The new PWG apartment building on Schärenmoosstrasse is conceived as a verdant urban oasis. In an optimistic gesture, it is crowned by an outwardly projecting terrace landscape. As in the American musical film Mary Poppins, the dance over the rooftops acts as a metaphor for autonomy and joie de vivre.

The upper stories contain multiform domestic worlds with different, economically designed apartment types with a robust simplicity. Using selected additions, the top story is transformed into an attractive, communal terrace landscape. The laundry rooms, the day room, and the various terraces provide the residents with both places to interact and more secluded, private retreats. The ground floor with a café and co-working and studio spaces opens up to the urban surroundings. It is embedded in an opulent garden with shaded trees, shrubs and fragrant flowers.

As space-to-space structures, the apartments are extremely robust and flexible in terms of occupancy. Including the height of the rooms, they are orientated on the well-proportioned workers’ flats of the late nineteenth century, connected to the rural idea of a central kitchen parlor. A 2.5-room apartment already has two lockable rooms and is suitable for a variety of residents, from single parents with a child, to two-person shared flats, to an older couple with two separate bedrooms. Even in the larger apartments, which are suitable for both families and communal forms of cohabitation, the kitchen is the focal point of the apartment. This is where people cook, eat and play. With its stoneware flooring, it can be transformed into an outdoor room by opening the windows on warm days. The studio apartments are designed as efficient L-shaped figures, which, despite the limited space, allow furniture to be divided into a dining and living area and a more sheltered sleeping area.

The extension of the rooftop terrace transforms the pragmatic top floor into a rich terraced world. With its balustrades overgrown with a curtain of climbing plants, the new sun deck meanders like an Islamic garden around the existing rooftop structures. This gesture gives the vertical annexes the look of being pavilions in the midst of a hanging garden, its character formed in unison with the green fingers of the residents and their desire to shape their surroundings. Overgrown pergolas provide shade and arrange the rooftop landscape into a place of togetherness, encounter, and retreat. The double figure of the laundry and the communal space form a social center point. The two flat-sharing communities, with their sociable occupants, support the creation of a spirit of neighborly inclusiveness.