Given the 79 official letters of opposition it generated from the neighbors (just two fewer than Herzog & de Meuron’s first Roche skyscraper in the city, Frommenwiler likes to point out), the Landskronhof scheme had every interest in being discreet. This is one reason it is concentrated at the center of the site, pulling away from neighboring buildings as it rises to allow enough daylight to penetrate to grade. “Initially, we imagined building lots of houses with a footprint of just one room,” says Frommenwiler, “but we soon realized that wouldn’t be financially sustainable. Instead, we thought, ‘Let’s be superefficient and have just one staircase/elevator tower to which all the units are attached.’ ” Pinwheeling around the core, the apartments decrease in number as the floors go up, forming an irregular pyramid. Each home enjoys generous outdoor spaces—gardens at the two grade levels (the site rises to the northwest) and terraces above, sometimes more than one per apartment—resulting in a sort of six-story piling up of single-family houses.

There are two entry points to both the site and the building: the foundation’s parking entrance leads to the lower ground floor, where a generous porch covers both pedestrian and car access (parking is in the basement), while, to the northwest, to allow pedestrians a way into the upper ground floor, HHF opened up an existing porte cochere that had been closed off for storage. The complexity of the urban situation is matched by HHF’s complex planning: containing between one and four bedrooms, no two apartments are alike, and a number of them are organized as cascading duplexes. Given the proximity of blind party walls at the lower levels, HHF went to great lengths to ensure adequate natural light, with generous glazing and ceiling heights, multiple aspects, and a studied play of long diagonal views inside. Visiting on a dull rainy day, all the apartments were plentifully lit.

In contrast to the planning, the construction aimed for maximum simplicity: the bare necessary amount of concrete for the slab-and-post frame (columns and hallway stairs were prefabricated), with non-loadbearing internal and external walls in brick or concrete, faced outside with white-painted wood to achieve a “light pavilion feel,” as Frommenwiler describes it. Window units are off-the-shelf, while the building envelope’s edges are blurred, thanks to the addition of vertical white-painted steel poles attached to the floor overhangs, with terrace and balcony railings fixed to them to form a scaffolding-like trellis that the architects imagine one day covered with climbing plants. Balconies, which widen out at strategic points in front of windows and link up with the terraces, run round the entire building with no barriers between properties, just as there is no fencing in the gardens. As one homeowner explains, “Everyone living here agreed that children should be able to run around the entire building at every level. There are currently 12 kids; the oldest is 10. They just bang on the window when they want to play.” In this respect, the project recalls the spirit of the well-known Davidsboden cooperative housing (Erny, Gramelsbacher, and Schneider, 1989–92) just a block away.

Free of traffic and danger, Landskronhof is indeed a children’s paradise, and there’s even a generous sandbox for them in the lower-ground landscaping. Living in such close proximity to other people’s offspring, not to mention enduring close diagonal views into adjacent apartments (there are sun blinds for those requiring privacy), might be a challenge outside the context of Switzerland, where neighborliness is often raised to an art form. And it no doubt helps that higher-income families bought the units, paying around $1,137 per square foot—a price that is slightly below average for what is not a cheap area—to live in generously proportioned properties. “It’s amazing to have a 2,000-square-foot garden in the heart of the city. Who has that?” exclaims another owner, underlining the fact that most families are forced into the suburbs to find this kind of accommodation. Because of this, the city loses most of its middle-class taxpayers to neighboring cantons—another reason the authorities were so keen to see this intelligent, unpretentious scheme succeed.