2020
Competition

Wohnhaus Staufen

Housing Staufen
Switzerland

2. Prize

The aim is to create a residential building for young and old inhabitants in the community of Staufen, which gives an inviting form to communal life and encounters and makes use of existing open spaces.

The heterogeneous building structure on the zone border requires mediation on a building scale, the immediate vicinity to open agricultural areas requires a clear structure and order of the plot.
Accordingly, building design and landscape design interlock to formulate a homely island of its own character.

An L-shaped building occupies the streets and defines a south-facing garden, to which the flats are intensively related.
Along the Juraweges, a three-storey volume reacts to the scale of the single-family houses opposite, while on Sennmattweg, the additional attic storey takes up the height of the neighbouring apartment buildings.

A dense landscape bordering the street is laid out around the plot, following the varied hedge plantings of the neighbours.
This creates an intensively planted filter zone between the buildings and the street, which, as softly formulated wild hedges, grants intimacy to the ground floor flats. In this zone, the access to the house is transformed into a green gate.

In reference to the old orchard in the south, a row of tall fruit trees integrates the property into the wider landscape and historical network.
Thus, surrounded by landscape and buildings, a precisely circumscribed garden courtyard, bordered by a pergola, is created in the centre of the plot. The small mat invites you to play or sunbathe, in the east a gravel area with a fireplace extends the common room into the garden, and finally, in the south-east, in the best sunny position, a row of raised beds forms the spatial conclusion.

Team:

Architecture:

Studio Gugger

General contractor:

Erne AG Holzbau

Landscape architect:

Maurus Schifferli Landschaftsarchitekt

Civil engineering:

Gruner AG

Building technology:

eicher+pauli AG

Electric planning:

EDICO Engineering AG

Visualisation:

Rablab