SBB Railway’s newly-minted headquarters outside of Wankdorf, Bern, has a striking visual feature — SEFAR® Architecture VISION fabric, laminated between moveable glass louvers. Five different variations of the VISION fabric interlayer absorb and disperse sunlight. The 6,258 individually moveable slats, which cover the 98,318 square-foot façade, allow occupants to open and angle the panels for fresh air and lighting control.
The site of the forestry center extends on both sides of the ‘Reuchenette’ road. To facilitate it’s function, the program’s content focused on only one side. Following the topography of the land, two buildings form an elongated space ending with a court for the maneuvers. The single level building dominates the main street façade and differs, both in form and aspect, from the urban architecture. Its envelope is made of rough and untreated strips of wood. It generates a oriented vertically texture, that dialogues with the forest structure and filters the light and the external views.
Diverse operational and economic considerations led to the development of a new kindergarten on the north side of the already existing primary school in Weiach. The new development was realised from pre-fabricated wooden elements. A child-friendly, delicate façade made from artificial lawn naturally moulds into the colour tones of straw gold, red kraut and olive green in the rural village centre and stimulates playful dialogue.
The project involved converting a former chapel built in 1924 in Art Deco style in a Bern neighbourhood and totally defaced in a 1970s renovation into two new apartments. In order to keep the ground floor free of supports and retain the high church windows, the upper apartment was hung as a concrete cube in the former double-storey nave.
On the eastern edge of the site, student housing and commercial and service areas provide a clear border on the public plaza. Extending to the south to include the Metro station, shops and restaurants are sheltered by a covered gallery with the hotel and student lodgings above. The large scale of the building is mediated through a series of articulations and variations in height of the different volumes that make up the complex. Only the central bodies of the building are carried up to level eight at the top. The outer facades clad in serigraphed glass and aluminium louvers maintain a clear dialogue with the convention center, the coloured window jambs anticipate the exuberance of the inner courtyard.
Tags: Ecublens, Switzerland Comments Off on EPFL Quartier Nord, SwissTech Convention Center in Ecublens, Switzerland by Richter · Dahl Rocha & Associés
Swiss luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet chooses BIG to expand its historic headquarters. The 2.400m2/25,800 ft pavilion will be a striking landmark to precision seamlessly integrated into the local landscape.
Team BIG, HG Merz, Luchinger & Meyer and Muller Illien´s design is rooted in the origins of the family owned company, a history of watchmaking that goes back centuries and is nested in the nature and culture of the Vallée de Joux. Surrounded by the historical workshops in Le Brassus in the heart of La Vallée de Joux, the new museum called Maison des Fondateurs, will be imbedded in the landscape – reuniting the buildings with the undulating fields of the valley.
The subject of the project is an old 18th century manor with several valuable buildings, including an orangery built in 1816. The orangery is an integral element of the project and contains part of the living space. The entire manor has an orthogonal design, with the one exception of the orangery, with its diagonal alignment towards the south-west. The volume of the new building behind it mediates between the two geometries.
Dost Architecture, a leading Swiss architectural firm with an ongoing concern for acoustics, was retained to develop a workflow and interior design concept to provide the expanding Hirslanden Heart Clinic with uncompromised functionality while also reflecting the organization’s intrinsic values. To ensure optimal acoustics and speech intelligibility for the new clinic, Dost engaged Walters-Storyk Design Group, global acoustics/architectural specialists, to study all aspects of the clinic’s room and structural acoustics – the latter being critical due to doctor-to-patient conversation privacy issues. A range of eight acoustical room treatments was developed based on WSDG findings. The clinic’s rooms were individually analyzed, and a matrix was created to determine which application would most benefit each room.
This seventeenth Century building has been transformed into a museum. We decided to keep the original historic building intact, only removing the heavy stone floor slabs that were causing the massive timber structure of the old building to subside.
This timber house is about different ways of perceiving the landscape surrounding it. There are two principal floors; one set 750mm below the earth, one 1500mm above. The ground floor consists of one single family room with a noticeably low horizontal ceiling. In this space there is a physical connection with the nature outside the continuous windows.
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