Vertical Village

We have won our first competition in Switzerland! In Pratteln, ten minutes by train to the east of Basel, a new urban quarter is being built on a former industrial terrain south of the Rhine and right beside the main railway station. Together with our partner office Bräunlin Kolb, we are planning a key site in the new Bredella development area: a 27-storey high-rise building serves as a mixed-use urban building block including a bus station as part of the new mobility hub. A hotel and apartments are situated on the upper floors; at the base, restaurants, stores, fitness facilities, and doctors’ clinics are grouped around the five-storey public atrium. The station square, which we co-designed to cite the landscape of the region, connects this blossoming new part of the city with the existing community south of the railway tracks.

Articulating the Townscape

Our project complements the existing high-rise buildings in Pratteln. As ever, such high-rises have a strong impact on the townscape and bear a design responsibility towards their surroundings. Following the competition phase, we collaborated with the competition jury and our clients in a workshop process lasting several months on the development of a facade with a coherent grid structure, playful depth, and subtle variations in the lesene and parapet elements. The overall appearance of the building is harmonious, and the layered functional mix is clearly tangible. On the ground floor, expressive arcades mark the public entrances to the premises.

»The high-rise is conceived as a vertical village – an urban hotspot for the area, open and vibrant at its perimeter.«

Functional Flexibility, Optimal Construction Time, Sustainable Ecological Balance

Planned together with ZPF Ingenieure, our competition design proposed a skeleton structure with a massive core. A grid of reinforced concrete columns provides the required spatial flexibility and adaptability on the standard floors. Thanks to prefabrication, the lightweight flat timber ceilings ensure a fast and efficient construction process. The timber soffits remain visible, while the statics of the flat ceilings offer great freedom for cable routing and adaptability in future spatial planning processes to come.