Studio Gugger | Neubau Reinacherstrasse

Protected garden, enclosed street

Based on the scale of the Dreispitz, the new building accompanies the arterial road as a large structured form and consistently shields the garden space behind it from noise. The staggered geometry, which breaks away from the street, creates legible addresses and avoids the direct vis-a-vis in favour of wider perspectives and references to Reinacherplatz.
On the forest side, a more suburban scale is created with a largely three-storey development and profiled façade line, while the parallelism of the buildings to Giornicostrasse extends the visual relationships into the open plateau.
While the building on the larger of the plots follows the course of the street on all sides, the smaller building on the opposite plot fits into the existing pattern of free-standing short blocks. The new buildings on both sides of Giornicostrasse are related to each other in expression and are connected by direct pathways.

The project creates added value for living from the intersection of the boundary conditions of building law, noise protection measures, structural efficiency, necessary façade development and plot depth. The balcony layers serve both as noise protection along the busy Reinacherstrasse and as structural sun protection on both sides; the balconies create private outdoor space to the quiet courtyard in the west and living space extension with intermediate climate in the east. In addition, the three-storey mural-like balcony façades extend the building envelope in such a way that the first attic storey in the insulation perimeter is largely identical to the standard storey.
In its appearance, the new building makes reference to typical buildings in skeleton construction on the Dreispitz. The simply structured new buildings in timber construction are divided, protected and extended by a steel balcony layer in front of the façade. On the first attic storey, the steel structure dissolves into a light pergola structure, so that the new building essentially appears as a four-storey building, similar to the neighbouring buildings.
On the forest side, the building height is reduced to just three storeys, the wood of the façade construction comes to the fore and the buildings interlock with the garden via their balcony layer.