Sports Center Oerlikon
Project Category: Studies/Competitions
Old Warteck-Areal, Riehenring
Housing Project Areal Schleife
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach
Zurich University of the Arts, Toni-Areal
Visitors Center Museum Kalkriese
Added later to the Archaeological Museum and Park Kalkriese, the visitors center now marks its entrance. The ground floor houses the reception desk, museum shop, and a children’s museum, while a multifunctional hall upstairs can be used as a large exhibition gallery or subdivided into smaller spaces by means of mobile partitions for use as meeting or conference facilities. Large windows on both sides offer views outdoors. The building is clad all around in facing bricks. The previous farmstead and the new building are united into a coherent ensemble by the material nature of their façades and together form an inviting courtyard.
Housing Development Broëlberg III
Urban Development Study Manegg
The former Sihlpapier site, located in the south of Zurich, in Manegg, is characterized both by a special lenticular form and by an island-like isolation. The river Sihl, the Sihlkanal, as well as the forest embankment to the highway and the highway itself have a shape-forming and isolating effect. The centered traffic axes of the cantonal road and the SZU railroad line form two similarly shaped sites with slightly different characteristics: The western side tends to be better connected to traffic and nonetheless more quietly situated against the Sihl than the eastern side, behind the SZU tracks and constrained by the highway. The central plots between these main traffic routes create a kind of backbone.
Housing Development Färberei-Areal
Four new buildings were planned for the site of the former “Färberei”, or textiledyeing factory, to be constructed in successive stages in order to establish an ensemble together with the refurbished “Blue Factory”. This former industrial area is thus gradually developing into an urban residential, commercial, and office district. The elongated, cubic buildings are set into the hillside like a fan, creating flowing interim spaces that expand to form plazas. The colors of the buildings were developed during the various construction phases in collaboration with the artist Harald F. Müller.
Three Houses on Susenbergstrasse
The articulation of the building mass into three volumes takes place within the context of the small-scale, “fine-grained” housing structure in the immediate and extended upscale neighborhood on the Zürichberg. In contrast to the solitary houses and villas, the building volumes react to each other by means of their proportions and with respect to their openings.
The division into three buildings allows the apartments to be oriented in all four directions, which also provides natural light and ventilation for the bathrooms and kitchens. The apartments are laid out in such a way that the service spaces - wet rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, and ancillary spaces - act as closed cores that generate a spatial articulation of the open “living space area”. The area thus defined can be easily subdivided into more conventional rooms or living spaces using large sliding doors. Nevertheless, this living area can still be understood as a continuous space aligned with the four points of the compass and correspondingly proportioned and formed.
The four-sided orientation of the apartments is differently accentuated depending on the varying location of the loggias to the east, south, and west. The loggias themselves are conceived as projections from the concrete façades that form narrow open-air rooms along the entire length and width of the building volumes.
The building structure is determined by the space-forming, load-bearing cores of the service blocks. A double-layered concrete façade completes the support framework. The exterior layer, made of in-situ concrete, forms the cantilevered loggias and the perforated parapets of the penthouses. The floor surfaces are made of concrete in various forms and finishes: poured concrete flooring for the living space areas, prefabricated polished cast stone tiles for the secondary rooms, and unpolished tiles for the terraces.
Mineral-based pigments, applied to the concrete with silicate, enable a highly matt, pollen-like “powdered” building surface. An additional intention was to attain the individualization of the three buildings by varying the colors used, while simultaneously emphasizing their compositional coherence. The final coloring was achieved in collaboration with the artist Adrian Schiess. The smallest building is painted a bright yellow, the largest, north-facing one is in grayish green with pink-painted loggias, and the medium-sized building is yellowish apricot with the west-facing façade painted light blue.
