BS+EMI Architektenpartner

Description

The two large buildings comprising the Riedacker cooperative residential development are located in northern Zurich. They are embedded in a heterogeneous setting between Altwiesenstrasse and Dübendorferstrasse where Albert Steiner’s garden city transitions into the ensembles of late modernism. The immediate context includes detached houses and commercial buildings as well as a church. The two buildings acknowledge Schwamendingen’s garden city qualities but interpret them in a distinctive configuration and with a new mode of living centred on a large square space that occupies each building corner. The space is divided by two diagonally inserted glass membranes into a kitchen, living room and terrace. We have compared this spatial structure to an arbour and spoken of living on a large terrace. In the four- and five-storey buildings, living beside the garden is, as it were, stacked. The staggered volumes are clad in a thin outer skin featuring a finely woven network of aluminium, glass and wood. Bright interiors transition into dark, hard-surfaced stairways, which boast exterior qualities – the arbour of each apartment is, figuratively speaking, directly accessible from the outside and yet part of an interior collective.