Designed as refugee and student housing, it offers affordable housing in a central location near the Altstetten train station. The building embodies a direct, simple materiality that counters its seriality with subtle tectonic and compositional principles, elevating it to a greater whole. The saw-tooth but delicate vertical spruce planking is struck further outward with each floor, which protects the wood structurally and gives the building tectonic layering by emphasizing horizontal layering. The applied vertical battening between the modular elements affirms the modular construction, but thereby ties the elements into an overarching facade order, creating a quiet, long building framed by a stoically continuous gutter.

The constructive play continues through the yard into the interior. Access is via filigree hot-dip galvanized arcades, which support monolithic concrete slabs in a kind of suspension of gravity. In the apartments, too, which are given a homely clarity by homogenized wooden surfaces, we find the steel structures again in the direct application of industrial kitchen elements, which in turn convince by their consistent composition and functionality. In other respects, too, the building is uncompromising in its search for qualities: despite its temporary character and mode of production, the building meets all the requirements of a regular residential building in Zurich, which derives from the strategy of material directness and careful joining.