Since Bremgarten has been photographed a lot from the air – probably because of the picturesque Reuss bends, the enclosed old town or the barracks – the development of the settlement can be traced particularly clearly here.
From the entrance to the medieval town, the Obertor, the roads radiate out into the open countryside towards Wohlen, Zug, Lucerne and Zurich. Around the turn of the 19th century, houses were built in loose succession along these arterial roads: Small residential buildings, mostly, many of which are gable-topped so that they look like onlookers watching the hustle and bustle on the street. They defined the scale of suburban development over long stretches and for a long time, before the large commercial and infrastructure buildings later established themselves in the development pattern of the suburb. This small-scale, compact basic disposition of the buildings along the street is characteristic of Bremgarten. And that is why it would be wrong to turn Zürcherstrasse into a «rue corridor»!
The second strong influence that characterises the place when viewed from the air is the structuring of the landscape with rows of trees. They are omnipresent and illustrate the cultural moulding of the landscape: sometimes as avenues shading the streets, mostly as rows of fruit trees, here as windbreaks in the open landscape, there as fortification of the banks of the Reuss. This «vegetation lane» becomes an urban planning leitmotif: Zürcherstrasse is transformed into a tree-lined boulevard. Because the perimeter of the project runs along a considerable length of Zürcherstrasse, the new avenue can also integrate the mighty plane trees between Obertor and the district school and sustainably enhance the currently forbidding streetscape.
These two characteristics of the town – the row of houses along the street and the rows of trees in the landscape – become the starting point for the design: Zürcherstrasse becomes a boulevard in the shade of the avenue trees, the spaces between which are populated by houses. In this way, the buildings remain permeable and yet the street space is defined. In fact, the houses themselves also resemble trees: a broadly projecting crown rises above their narrow trunks, providing shelter and shade for as many people as possible, while people live and work in the crowns themselves.
