The articulated large buildings along Überlandstrasse facing the Glatt are deliberately set directly on the heavily trafficked road. Unlike Albert Heinrich Steiner’s residential buildings, they do not stand in an undefined green space but explicitly reference the street axis through the way they form an edge. This expresses the idea that the strategy was not to retreat into greenery at a buffer distance from traffic, but to discover a spatial quality within the axis and movement of the traffic itself. The long frontage along Überlandstrasse is structured by two recesses that are half courtyard.  

Engagement with the garden-city identity nonetheless took place: the attempt to approach the qualities and characteristics of the garden city is to be found on the other side of the buildings facing the Glatt, where the strong densification along the street space makes it possible to preserve a large open area. The quality of this space is also shaped by a river corridor that has been carved out from a former straightening of the river.  

The intervention on the pointed plot, which is gripped like a pair of tongs by the two major roads, is oriented toward the building structures leading to the centre of Schwamendingen and, through its two alignments, picks up the existing axes. The northern volume adopts the height of the row buildings, while the southern one, through its vertical development, creates the transition and connection to the plot south of Winterthurerstrasse. At the foremost tip of the narrow perimeter, development is deliberately omitted. The resulting open space interacts with the courtyard-like recess in the buildings opposite on Überlandstrasse and with the expansiveness of the street situation. Rows of trees are to be planted along the streets, lending the thoroughfares additional generosity and thus bestowing a specific quality on the indispensable, but too often denied, traffic situation. For the motorist entering the city from outside, the new place appears as a gateway to the inner city. Residents in the upper floors of the street-side buildings look out onto a river of trees.  

South of Winterthurerstrasse, the project proposes more pronounced vertical development. This is also a response to the preservation of the existing high-rise, which is to gain greater self-evidence by being paired with a counterpart. A third tall building completes the constellation together with Hirzenbach. There are commercial uses and a strongly public ground floor. The new ensemble consists of high-rises and lower, elongated buildings. The new situation seeks a poetry of density.

“Vegetation lenses” with trees and shrubs refine each respective urban situation and structure movement within the new urban block.