The goal: expand the district center of Osterfeuerberg with a broad offer of public zones and build it into a sustainable inner-city urban environment. The trick: laying out a sequence of no less than three public-square spaces, the design by AllesWirdGut and ghl reorders the existing urban structure into a variform new quarter that fulfills multiple urban functions.

The center of the quarter is the new town square with a supermarket, café, and
kindergarten. Oriented toward Holsteiner Strasse, it links the existing Brauereihof (cultural venue and restaurants) with the concave quarter’s square. A boulevard with a mobility hub overlooking the area, the quarter’s square connects to the green center of the neighborhood.

Through a flight of outdoor stairs, this green space with its near-natural landscaping in turn connects to the children’s playground courtyard on the supermarket rooftop. The result is a varied loop route leading through the entire quarter. Apart from the supermarket, café, and kindergarten, the hybrid building on the town square also accommodates upper-floor apartments and most of the parking spaces. The townhouse is built in the first stage of construction, followed by a generous residential courtyard with both subsidized and privately financed units as well as terraced houses with non-underbuilt private gardens. While the built volume of the urban hybrid typologically takes its inspiration from the existing buildings in the surrounding area (school building on Pulverberg and Union Brewery), the slender volumes of the multi-floor residential and terraced housing respond to the smaller-scale structures of the neighborhood.

The residential floors above the kindergarten have a wide access balcony. The units here all are through apartments with different floor plans due to the varying building depth. Situated across the entire development, the multi-floor housing is organized as three and four apartments per floor suitable with the scale of the quarter. The terraced houses on the edges of the site are available in two different widths.

In keeping with its functional mix, the quarter is understood as a collage of solid
structures with differently colored clinker facades. A recurring window format and uniform greened rooftops provide for design consistency. Uses largely superimposed on one another (apartments on top of kindergarten on top of supermarket on top of underground garage) allow for large areas of the site to remain unsealed and serve as aquifer recharge areas.