Windows of residences located at head height of passers-by or façades that are hermetically sealed off externally: the appropriate use of the ground floor level is one of the great challenges of contemporary city planning. The research project Ground Floor Interface by the Wüstenrot Foundation, directed by Doris Zoller, is dedicated to the role of the ground floor as a transitional area between public urban and private residential space. This focuses on a typological study of the ground floor level in dense residential developments. Exemplary projects from Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Geneva, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Milan, Munich, Oita, Paris, Tokyo, Tübingen, Venlo, Winterthur, and Zurich show particularly successful, spatially innovative, and transferable solutions, which can contribute significantly to greater creativity and diversity in this usage sensitive transitional area between residential and urban construction.

With contributions by: Doris Zoller, Stephen Bates, EM2N, Johannes Fiedler, Sou Fujimoto, Stefanie Hennecke, Hiromi Hosoya, Alban Janson, Marcel Meili, Tina Saaby, Markus Schaefer, Stephan Trüby, Sophie Wolfrum