Lineaar – Living above the railway, Aarau (CH)
New building

Hybrid mix next to the Aarau railway station: the loosened-up perimeter block development accommodates a coach house, shops and restaurants and up to four residential storeys above, whose arcades provide protection from the railway noise. The ribbon-like structure of the façades ensures a homogeneous expression of the mixed-use ensemble. The noise-protected inner courtyard, which enhances the island site – surrounded by two busy roads and the railway area – was the main argument in favour of a perimeter block development, a typological novelty for Aarau.

The relaxed ring shape responds in a differentiated way to the various requirements of the utilisation programme. The coach house occupies the longest of the three legs of the building along the railway site. It was built over with four storeys of offices and flats. A second block adjoins at an obtuse angle, while a third - angled - follows Hintere Bahnhofstrasse and closes the resulting inner courtyard. Shops and restaurants enliven the ground floor, while the flats open up to the inner courtyard with large loggias.

The Zurich landscape architects Balliana Schubert address this overlapping of private and public usage requirements in their open space concept. They have created softly contoured, raised islands on the hard surfacing of the courtyard area, which are planted with trees and form sheltered areas for the neighbouring ground floor uses.

The surrounding parapet bands made of light-coloured fibre-reinforced concrete panels bind the mix of uses together to form a large, effective urban form. This allows the ensemble to assert itself in its disparate surroundings and gives users and residents a striking address on this important access axis to the city centre.