This new movie produced by film studio Spirit of Room excursions the interior of the Tamedia Workplace Creating in Zurich – the 1st Swiss project finished by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban.
The unnarrated, two-minute video created by the Chicago-based mostly movie firm shows exterior and interior shots of the seven-storey, wood and glass creating, which was completed in 2013 on a prominent site in central Zurich.
The structure is an expansion to the existing headquarters for Tamedia, a leading Swiss media business. The 10,120-square-metre (109,000 square foot) project also entailed including two storeys to the prime of a neighbouring constructing occupied by Tamedia.
The building’s most notable characteristic is its exposed structural system made fully of timber, with no metal connectors. Ban, the 2014 Pritzker Prize laureate, produced the system in collaboration with Swiss engineer Hermann Blumer, who specialises in timber structures.
Relevant story: Shigeru Ban wins Pritzker Prize 2014
Ban chose wood for its sustainable properties – it is a renewable building material – and for aesthetic functions. The timber offers the building “a exclusive visual appeal from the within space, as properly as from the city all around,” explained his firm.
The wood-framed structure is clad in a glass skin. “Particular consideration was given to obtaining lower-vitality transmission amounts that reply to the most recent and very stringent Swiss regulations in terms of power consumption,” mentioned the company.
The building’s 50-metre-extended (164 foot) eastern elevation is considered the principal facade. It stretches along a hectic street and overlooks the River Sihl.
The facade characteristics a patchwork of tall, retractable windows that lift upward, revealing informal rooms that grow to be open to the air. This operable window technique “reinforces the privileged partnership among the interior of the creating and its surrounding landscape,” explained the company.
Within, the developing is defined by open-play layouts, with wooden beams and columns visible throughout. The lobby features terrazzo flooring made with river stones, along with cardboard tube chairs and tables from Ban’s Carta Series, originally developed for Cappellini in the late 1990s.
The building houses around 480 workers of Tamedia. The media firm has been working to consolidate all of its offices into this centralised location in Zurich.
Connected story: Shigeru Ban completes Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch
Ban has long used timber, cardboard and other experimental resources in his architecture. Notable examples consist of the Aspen Art Museum in the US, the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, and the Cardboard Cathedral in New Zealand. Lately, he created a pavilion made of 90,000 empty makeup instances for the Venice Biennale.
The Japanese architect has offices in Tokyo, Paris and New York.
Photography is by Didier Boy de la Tour.
