At the Zurich Centre for Hearing and Speech, children and young people with hearing and/or severe speech impairments are cared for, taught and sometimes accommodated from kindergarten to upper school. On the ZGSZ site, a new residential and lunch group building with a production kitchen and a car park with a site closure are to be built. The WALDRAP / Lüchinger+Meyer / Weber Energie und Bauphysik team was awarded first place in the competition organised by the Canton of Zurich Building Department.
The “Diagoon” project responds to the limited space with a free-standing, six-storey building whose deliberately minimised footprint aims to keep as much outdoor space as possible free. Following the design principle of the eponymous “Diagoon houses” by Herman Hertzberger, a structural framework is created that provides sufficient freedom for individual design. This creates open and bright spaces that provide good visual connections for people with disabilities to communicate in sign language.