In the western districts of Zurich, a 2,500 square meter timber complex has appeared on an abandoned railway system. Rosa discountdesigned and built by the Budapest-based studio Hi Woodit’s a hard-to-miss structure: pink cross-leaf timbers stacked on three outdoor levels, threaded with bridges, staircases and treehouse cabins, housing a restaurant, bar and event spaces.
It’s a powerful architectural gesture in a city whose visual vocabulary is far more somber, and yet the most interesting story about it isn’t its color. The entire structure took just 5 months to build and was designed in a way that it would not disturb the people living around it.
Remise Rosa by Hello Wood © György Palkó
Remise Rosa by Hello Wood © György Palkó
Remise Rosa by Hello Wood © György Palkó
Remise Rosa by Hello Wood © György Palkó
Remise Rosa by Hello Wood © György Palkó
Remise Rosa by Hello Wood © György Palkó
Remise Rosa by Hello Wood © György Palkó
Remise Rosa by Hello Wood:
A site of reinvention
West Zurich was, until the end of the 20th century, the industrial backbone of the city: steel mills, shipyards, clustered along the railway lines and the river Limmat. When the factories closed in the 1980s, the area fell into disrepair. What followed was a heavy urban transformation: the former factory halls became theaters and galleries, shopping arcades and the old premises created the Prime Tower, Switzerland’s tallest building.
Zurich West became a working case study in adaptive reuse, a place where industrial waste is treated as raw material for the new life of citizens rather than obstacles to removal. Remise Rosa is the latest addition to the neighborhood philosophy.
A quiet change
The building’s structure is made of cross-laminated timber, a material made by gluing layers of solid sawn timber at right angles to large, strong, stable panels. CLT has been common in Europe for over a decade, but remains relatively rare in public infrastructure. What CLT enables, combined with CNC-based prefabrication, is a separation between where a building is constructed and where it is assembled. Each component was precision manufactured in an out-of-town factory before being trucked to the site and assembled.
This process allowed the entire complex to go from start to finish in 5 months, a time frame that would have been impossible to imagine for a conventionally built concrete or masonry structure, with formwork, wet trades and the noise and dust that comes with pouring and curing material on site. This speed is not just a cost advantage, it is also a way to coexist with a residential neighborhood. While urban transformations are great, their announcements often strike terror into locals, who already expect to be stuck with years of closed roads, noise pollution and inhospitable conditions.
Design with confidence
None of this technical discipline is hidden behind a neutral building. THE of architecture the defined aesthetic contrasts with its surroundings. Principal architect Balázs Szelecsényi described the intention to build something that would stand out from its industrial, colorless contrast with a kind of confident elegance.
This is unusual in industrial sites in transition, which are usually redeveloped with either heritage-based conversions that preserve their original fabric or sanitized new developments that erase history in favor of neutrality. Hi Wood decided to do neither, reading the layered, pedestrianized spatial logic of the old courtyard and reinforcing its logic with an unapologetically modern and colorful intervention.
