Quarter Sillhöfe, Innsbruck (AT)

Due to Innsbruck’s valley location, surrounded by high mountains, there are only a few free spaces in the city for the construction of urgently needed affordable housing. The area of the so-called Sillhöfe in Innsbruck’s Pradl Süd district covers around 50,000 square metres and offers the opportunity to build 800 new flats here. We were invited to submit our ideas for a master plan as the basis for the realisation competition.

Concept
The result is a garden and horticultural city that focuses on people, quality of life and social interaction. The area is organised into eight building fields. Each of these fields groups a manageable number of residents into a “neighbourhood” and enhances it with large, central and communally used outdoor spaces. The structure of row and angle buildings minimises disturbance from the outside and ensures good circulation.

Green Courtyards and roofs
Eight green courtyards inside the block create encounter places for the socially and age-mixed community of residents. Greenhouses on the roofs and on the ground floor also serve as neighbourly meeting points and individual recreational spaces that create identification. On the peripheries of the neighbourhood, street cafés and shop windows activate the street space, show urban life and work and invite people to stay.

High-rise and small structures
Three high-rise buildings with a maximum of eight storeys set accents within the area. In the north, the dense development edge minimises noise emissions, in the west there are four- to five-storey buildings and in the south there follow small-scale settlement structures.