werk, bauen + wohnen 10-2025 Hybrid City
Making Virtue out of Necessity
Zoning plans are vital planning instruments. When they were invented around a hundred years ago, cities and towns were still colourful potpourris, but also loud and polluted. Living in green surroundings was healthier. Functional disaggregation solved some of the problems, but at the same time created new ones: dormitory towns, deserted commercial districts, long distances. Land is a rare and pricy commodity in today’s cities, whereby scarce land reserves for housing and public occupancies also act as a motor for unconventional solutions. One approach that has the potential to generate synergies is stacking.
Nevertheless, hybrid buildings present numerous challenges, in the sense that multiple needs and demands collide in scant spaces. In Zurich a school recently moved into an eight-storey office building (see wbw 12–2024, p. 68) and recently people have begun living over a tram depot. The upshot? Land-saving and mixed planning enhances variety and density. Vacant spaces can be used in a hybrid way, successfully challenging customary occupancy schemes.
Two co-joined high-rise towers in the Northern Quarter of Brussels illustrate these new, complex ideas about the city, reweaving existing architectural stock. The ZIN project is the result of an upstream planning process, using the revamping of a mono-functional urban neighbourhood as a think-tank laboratory. The development above the Hard tram depot in Zurich was a similarly iterative process: it took 35 years, numerous planning attempts and a public controversy about the pros and cons of high-rise building before the current solution was reached, with approximately 550 people now housed perched on top of an infrastructural public-transport node. Even today, these types of stacked, mixed-use proposals still resonate with the aura of that city of all cities—New York—as the archetype for such daring leaps in urban scale. The architect and debut-author Simon Rott was there and shared his thoughts about the phenomenon. Then, a prime example of an architectural-cultural transfer from the 1930s is the Rialto. As an urban hybrid, it imported metropolitan ideas from overseas and broke them down to the local scale of Basel, combining a swimming pool with apartments, offices with restaurants. Last but not least, we’ve taken the opportunity to talk to the municipal urban planners themselves in order to get a direct impression of what the future of mixed-use urban planning holds in store. — Lucia Gratz