Project Description
Rental housing in Switzerland can be bleak. “Often you have a developer and he says it has to be like this, the color like this, the material like this, and at the end everything looks the same,” says Ivar Heule, partner with the Zurich-based architecture firm Wild Bär Heule Architekten. “We wanted to show how you could live if there is no developer saying how it should be.”
So in 2011, Heule and partners Thomas Wild and Sabine Bär bought a small property with an existing house in the town of Winterthur, a few miles northeast of Zurich, and designed a four-unit rental apartment building for the site where the house stood, usurping the role of the developer to build something more ambitious.
The result is a contemporary and unconventional design for the area—all glass and lines. A stark, geometrical open-air concrete stair at the northwest corner is the only exception to the otherwise jewel-box grid of floor-to-ceiling windows on the rest of the exterior. The 550-square-meter (5,920-square-foot) building is a divergence from the peaked roofs and window-pocked masonry walls of surrounding apartments, its glass façades rising straight up to a modest rooftop patio space, which is accented by a planter containing a single tree. A basement contains storage, laundry facilities, and a bike room.
Inside each of the identical 70-square-meter (750-square-foot) full-floor units, the rooms are delineated by a freestanding shelving and storage structure built out of oiled wood. Its mass separates the kitchen from the bedroom and bathroom, and doors within the core allow zones to be cordoned off or combined. (An additional room can serve as another bedroom or an office.)
The building’s heating and cooling come from radiant floors and a geothermal system. Near one end of the kitchen and main common area, a minimal fireplace is cut into the multipurpose core structure. Every other one of the wall-sized Krapf windows is also a sliding door, and wire rope from Jakob across the openings ensures safety when the doors are open. Though interior drapes provide privacy, the almost fully transparent façade is the architects’ way of making the building stand out.
“Nothing is hidden,” Heule says. “It isn’t made out of plastic. You get what you see.” And the smooth concrete floors and ceilings, the oiled wood room separator, the wide glass walls, and the odd beam of structural steel are pretty much all there is to see. “It’s rough and it’s honest,” Heule says.
Although the architects started this project in 2011, demolition and construction didn’t begin until five years later. The design evolved, Heule says, but is very close to what was originally planned. The project, completed in July 2017, is now fully rented. “It took a lot of time,” Heule says, “but you feel the quality.”
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Project Credits
Project: Housing Tower
Client: Konsortium Grenzstrasse
Architect: Wild Bär Heule Architekten, Zurich . Ivar Heule, Thomas Wild, Sabine Bär (partners)
Structural Engineer: Schärli + Oettli
Geotechnical Engineer: Gruenberg + Partner
Construction Manager: Robauen
Size: 550 square meters (5,920 square feet)
Cost: 1.9 million CHF ($1.9 million USD)
This article appeared in ARCHITECT’s January 2018 issue.