Zurich 大都会综合体

Firm： E2A Piet Eckert und Wim Eckert Architekten

Type： Commercial › Office Retail Cultural › Cultural Center Hospitality + Sport › Hotel Restaurant Residential › Multi Unit Housing

STATUS： Built

YEAR： 2009

Photos： Georg Aerni (2)

Europaallee is one of the largest real estate developments in the heart of Zurich and lies just beyond the main train station. Our site is the final of eight total new constructions and is directly adjacent to the multicultural and rather infamous urban “Langstrasse” district. The complex is comprised of a mixed-use site that juxtaposes a hotel, office space, apartments, restaurants, a nursery, an event space, a cinema, a school, and retail space. This challenge is both an opportunity and a challenge.

On a three-story base in direct correlation with the scale of the surrounding buildings, two high-rise structures of varying heights project to the north and south and create a typological combination between an urban block and two towers. The free-standing hotel, which appears as a compressed form of a detached building, acts as a conclusion of the development and a spatial link to Langstrasse.

The buildings are subdivided according to their tectonic logic into high rises and plinths. A further subdivision is generated through the color scheme of the window glass and the subtle layering and variation of the window details. The programmatic entities therefore can be read in the particularity of the façades without losing the totality of one common architectural language.