Articles by Paula Pintos

The Westhof Dübendorf by Conen Sigl Architects stands on the plot of a former plant nursery along the tracks of the Hochbord area in Dübendorf near Zurich. The neighborhood, a former industrial and commercial zone, is undergoing major restructuring due to its re-zoning into a residential area. Inspired by the site’s history as a plant nursery, the cooperative housing project with complementary communal uses creates an identity-forming place that fosters a strong sense of community and ecological connectivity. Its architectural language, with its robust and simple materialization, echoes the functionality of the previous structure, while the proximity to a nature reserve reinforces its connection to the area’s ecosphere.

The central concern of the Feld 4 housing cooperative was the creation of spaces for collective living with intensive, neighborly interaction in the sense of a family house community. The participatory planning began with the first fundamental decisions on the typology and continued through to the fine-tuning of details and materials. In particular, this participatory process led to the development of an individualization for the extension that was appropriate to the size of the house.

A family resemblance. Sector E of the Athletes’ Village is first and foremost a family resemblance. As coordinator architect of the sector, CoBe has pre-written the main guidelines that govern the design of the various buildings while leaving some leeway to the individual designers. As such, the visuals of the CoBe project produced for the competition have served from the outset as reference images to represent the entire project in the sector. To ensure its total coherence, the family resemblance has been extended into the skeleton of the buildings, using a common construction method, based on a system of post-and-beams combining wood and low-carbon concrete.