Hönggerberg Estate, Zurich

If you look at Höngg from a bird's eye view, the houses of the Hönggerberg settlement immediately catch your eye. While almost all other buildings in the neighborhood are aligned either transversely or longitudinally to the slope, these here stand diagonally to it, like stubborn animals in a well-behaved herd. From the frog's perspective of the city dweller, this slanting position causes the open space to flow unimpeded between the buildings. The streets do not act as boundaries, but move like 'parkways' through the landscape, and again and again vistas of astonishing depth open up, allowing a view down into the Limmat Valley or up to the open countryside on the Hönggerberg. Can this distinctive feature of the site be preserved in a much more densely built-up future? This claim became the benchmark for the new planning. The second characteristic of the site is the picturesque coniferous trees: pines and larches are reminiscent of the alpine milieu that gave the Engadin Trail its name. This characteristic is also to be incorporated into the new planning.

The larger buildings in the southern construction area are arranged in a zigzag pattern. This opens up the spaces in between - sometimes downhill, sometimes uphill - and avoids confrontational vis-à-vis between the rows of buildings. The smaller buildings in the northern construction area, on the other hand, are offset from one another in a zipper-like manner - RiRi even. This creates an informal order that does not disturb the large landscape context, but rather plays around it.

How do you convey a feeling of "living in the treetops" at this location - at the transition from the city to the countryside, between larches and pines? Through large balconies reaching out into the greenery, actual tree houses.... That is why the rows of buildings are fanned out like scales, like the open scales of pine cones. In each protrusion there is room for an over-corner oriented balcony, which offers as much view and at the same time protection as no other balcony form. Because the structures are spread out, the direct, rigid vis-à-vis with the neighbor is avoided and instead the view is diverted into the depth of the settlement area.

The modulation of the building structure results in the twisting of the access cores on the inside. These stabilize the buildings not only technically-constructively, but also spatially by arranging the serving rooms and bedrooms into orthogonally structured clusters. Between these orthogonal clusters, the living and dining areas mediate as a softly flowing sequence of spaces. The rotation of the cores in relation to each other shapes this sequence of rooms into a 'breathing' structure in which widenings and constrictions alternate.