We broke down the Zollhaus into three separate volumes that stand beside an area of railway tracks and terminates the district. The ensemble of buildings responds to the tight situation by swiveling away from the central construction and dropping one story below the regulation limit. We connect the three volumes with a custom façade system. We offer indoor and outdoor community spaces to ensure that the Zollhaus can function as a collective home. The differentiation of the programmatic, spatial and atmospheric qualities is linked to the gradual transition from public to semi-private and to the individual private realm of each resident. A backbone of pedestrian circulation connects the communal areas with bridges across the three volumes. To ensure the long-term flexibility of this housing experiment, the structure must allow the building to change in use and occupation. Consequently, we designed the building as a structurally robust shell of shelves. The result is a raw and direct aesthetic that is open to appropriation by the users.
This project was developed while I was with EM2N in collaboration with Fabian Hörmann, Aljosha Kotnjek, Mathias Müller, Daniel Niggli, Ilja Maksimov, K.Scheffer and Krzysztof Marciszewsk. More information on the EM2N website. This project has been published on Beta Architecture and Afasia.