Small Animal Clinic

Länggassstrasse 128 

The architecture competition in 1999 for the new Small Animal Clinic for which there had long been a pressing need called for a new building that would be integrated into the existing ensemble of the Animal Clinic, serve as its new urban planning visiting card on Länggassstrasse and smoothly fulfill a multitude of complex tasks ranging from services for the public to sophisticated usages in terms of research, diagnostics and imaging procedures (x-rays etc.) also for larger animals.

Winners Fritz Schär & Michael Smolenicky proposed an unspectacular cube with punched out inner courtyards and a foyer suggesting a broad facade opening on the exterior. This design convinced those at the urban planning level due to the careful integration into the overall complex and the spatial relationships and visual connections. The building that emerged clothes the sophisticated development and spatial program in a shell that is shaped by the calm rhythm of the large gray facade elements. Against this bedrock background, the roof, building services, window openings and accesses display artistic and material quality and at the same time bear witness to the challenging technical task.

What from a formal perspective is a greatly reduced building greets the visitor with a tasteful foyer that with its many lines of vision along corridors, toward the stairwell, through the interior window into the waiting room and through a kind of display window into one of the courtyards points towards the transparency and diversity of the building. The interior courtyards are detached from reality as intensive color spaces (the architects call them paint containers). The richness of the building lies in the materiality of its surfaces that create a warm and neutral environment for some expressive images and views such as that of the brightly colored shelves of files behind the sycamore counter in the archive room.