Anna and Otto at Erlenbach station
Our little success story at the railway stations on the right bank of Lake Zurich continues. After recently winning first place in the study competition for the Herrliberg-Feldmeilen railway station, our structural engineers, together with the Ernst Niklaus Fausch Partner team, are now delighted with the success of the competition in the neighbouring municipality of Erlenbach. Here, too, the development of the station area with a mixed-use development and the upgrading of the public space were the main tasks.
The design concept of the “Anna + Otto” project includes the construction of two new buildings parallel to the tracks, with an extensive seating area and staircase with a high quality of stay – the “lakeside terrace” – in front of them on the street side. A slender, very long structure (“Anna”), reminiscent of an SBB wagon on a siding, houses 37 flats on the upper floors and commercial space and a day-care centre on the ground floor. The two-storey basement is intended primarily as a parking garage. A new, open pavilion on the station square (“Otto”) serves as a waiting area for railway passengers and contains a kiosk, toilet facilities and bicycle parking.
The proposed supporting structure is a reinforced concrete skeleton construction. The load-bearing structure was consistently developed from the grid resulting from the required parking areas in the basements. The chosen continuous column grid – 8.0 m in longitudinal direction, 6.8 m (inner bay) with edge bays half as wide in transverse direction – has significant advantages for vertical load transfer. In the transverse direction of the building, the two inner rows of columns carry the majority of the vertical building loads. The external façade columns are subject to little load and only support the thermally separated balcony areas. This ensures a robust and structurally simple supporting structure.
The jury praised the project as a robust and coherent design with numerous outstanding qualities. “The project with the urban residential building and its clear addressing at Bahnhofplatz with the appealing pavilion represents a contemporary and convincing intervention at Erlenbach station.”
From 19th to 27th of May 2021, all project designs can be viewed at the Erlibacherhof from 10 a.m. – 7 p.m. each day.
(Visualisations: Cyaan, Zurich)
