For decades, various commercial uses were discussed for above and next to this central-Zürich site owned by the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB/CFF/FFC).

The previous developments under the name HB-Südwest changed to the Eurogate projects with the entrance of a new investor in October 1996 - the major Swiss bank, UBS (UBS Fund Management AG, Basel).

Also at this time, the corporation HB-Südwest, which had been founded in March 1995 with the task of working through the overall project for HB-Südwest and the residential development for the Lagerstrasse in Zürich until start of construction, was renamed as Eurogate Zürich AG.

With this change, the tasks were expanded to include the developing the entire project until completion.

In the 1970s, Luigi Snozzi and Mario Botta had participated in the original competition with a design for a slender bridge-construction over the tracks, but their project was not further developed.