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Architects: Christ & Gantenbein
- Area: 10000 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Walter Mair
Text description provided by the architects. Roche’s campus in Grenzach-Wyhlen was established more than a century ago as its first manufacturing base near the Swiss border. It now houses around 1450 employees working for Roche Pharma AG (Germany). The campus’ architectural heritage reveals how collaboration has evolved: from a functional industrial space dominated by the manufacture to a human-centered environment fostering interaction and teamwork within a rational and industrial framework.
The Multifunctional Workspace Building is Christ & Gantenbein’s third completed project on the campus, following an office building and a technical building constructed in 2011. At the forefront of Roche’s next chapter, the newest addition, anchored in the campus history, embraces change in a formal, spatial, and urbanistic reinterpretation of the firm’s architectural and cultural traditions. Reinforcing the existing interstitial spaces with a series of public plazas and continuing the series of buildings with rational vocabulary, acts as a distinctive landmark and primary point of access, generating corporate publicity that addresses a larger community.
A spatial generosity defines the appearance of the Multifunctional Workspace Building. Recalling an “industrial palazzo”, its façade’s composition conveys dignity and representation. The borders are accentuated by vertical, crisscrossing beams, which bring forward its specific structural concept, and in reference to its manufacturing background, high-quality yet sober materials create a refined and understated elegance.
The simple cube is built from prefabricated, locally sourced concrete elements and stands 23 meters high with a footprint of 50 by 36 meters. The façade system is defined by horizontal bands and consists of aluminum panels, mullions, transoms, and ribbon windows, permitting multiple visual connections. Most remarkably, the building’s corners seem open; this results from a typological feature that shifts infrastructural and circulatory elements to its corners, freeing up the center on all floors above ground and forming an exposed, column-free interior space. The opening-up of this industrial cube reveals spatial, visual, and symbolic qualities, which further manifest themselves in an extraordinary interior.
The basic idea of the project is an elementary one: to provide a generous, non-hierarchical space for Roche’s employees to meet and work. It boldly embodies this idea through an open-plan design that invites unrestrained movement through its radically column-free floors, providing natural light and vistas throughout. Recalling an industrial language, the prefabricated, pre-stressed coffered-ceiling elements give the building its signature flexibility by spanning almost the entire footprint of the building.
A publicly accessible entry hall on the ground level opens onto a double-story forum on the first and second floors with smaller-scale pockets, followed by two levels of flexible spaces that create the foundation for a “work to meeting” environment and new modes of collaboration. All floors are connected via the building’s staircases, housed at its corners. Time and again, the four staircases appear from unexpected angles, revealing views of the surrounding hills, Roche’s industrial heritage, the neighboring town of Grenzach-Wyhlen, and the city of Basel in the distance.
The functional and comfortable interior allows for diverse gatherings, from the customizable 550 seat auditorium which can be partitioned into three individual halls, down to areas for hyper-concentrated, individual work, providing a canvas for direct, authentic, and non-digital exchange in an inclusive and non-hierarchical setting. Individual workspaces, adjustable desks, and enclosed zones for privacy are mingled with conference rooms dispersed throughout the open floorplan.
All furniture is based on a concept proposed by INCHfurniture in collaboration with Christ & Gantenbein; making it as flexible, modular, and updatable as possible and position only a select range of permanent fixtures. INCHfurniture led this collaborative process to an extraordinary result: a lively, rich, and eclectic interior design that clearly and consciously contrasts the rigid and austere architectural design by filling it with an animated world of highly adaptable, custom furniture defined by joie de vivre.
