The prison at the ‘Froschgraben’ has shaped the townscape of Schwäbisch Hall for 160 years. As early as the 1960s, the town in the northeast of Baden-Wurtemberg bought the site of the historic prison, known in the local vernacular as the ‘Kocher Hotel’, and tried to turn it into a new and modern town centre. When the prison closed in the late 1990s, the way was free for a new urban utilisation. A large planning competition took place with the aim of finding the most meaningful property development for this historic place. It was thereby essential that the old prison buildings be retained and integrated into the project. The concept for the new Kocher Quarter was developed by a group of property developers together with the GWG and the Schwäbisch Hall public utilities company as well as the VR Bank Schwäbisch Hall-Crailsheim. The idea was for a town centre with shops, services and residential space that would fit harmoniously into the inner-city image. At the same time, the historic building fabric along the Salinenstrasse was to be retained and carefully restored. Sensitively, from the point of view of traffic, the 200 x 80 m building site was boxed in below the historic old part of the town between the former prison and a central bus station and thus placed great demands on the building site logistics.