If you look at Höngg from a bird's eye view, the houses in the housing scheme Hönggerberg immediately catch your eye. While almost all the other buildings in the neighbourhood are aligned either lengthways to or across the slope, here they stand diagonally to it, like stubborn animals in a well-behaved herd. From the city dweller's frog's-eye view, this diagonal position means that the open space can flow unhindered between the buildings. The streets do not act as boundaries, but move through the landscape like «parkways», and again and again vistas of astonishing depth open up, offering views down into the Limmat valley or up to the open countryside on Hönggerberg. Can this distinctive feature of the site be saved for a much more densely built-up future? This aspiration became the benchmark for the new planning. The second characteristic of the site are the picturesque conifers: pines and larches are reminiscent of alpine environments, which gave Engadinerweg its name. This characteristic is also incorporated into the project.
The larger buildings in the southern construction site are zig-zagged towards each other. This opens up the spaces in between – sometimes downhill, sometimes uphill – and avoids confrontational vis-à-vis between the rows of buildings. By contrast, the smaller buildings in the northern construction site are offset from each other in a zip-like manner – RiRi. This creates an informal order that does not disrupt the large landscape context, but rather swirls around it.
How do you convey a feeling of «living in the treetops» at this location – at the transition from the city to the countryside, between larches and pines? Through large balconies extending into the greenery, actual tree houses... This is why the rows of buildings are fanned out like the open scales of pine cones. Each projection has space for a balcony orientated towards the corner, offering more views and protection than any other balcony form. Because the building volumes are splayed out, the direct, rigid vis-à-vis with the neighbour is also avoided and instead the view is diverted into the depths of the settlement.
The modulation of the building volume causes the circulation cores to rotate. They stabilise the buildings not only technically and structurally, but also spatially by arranging the service rooms and bedrooms into orthogonally structured clusters. The living and dining areas mediate between these orthogonal clusters as a softly flowing sequence of rooms. The rotation of the cores in relation to each other forms this sequence of rooms into a «breathing» structure in which expansions and constrictions alternate.
