Office skyscraper for the company Maag-Areal in Zürich

Skyscraper and context. Three anchorage points
The European tradition of the high-rise building insists on establishing relations rather than proposing self-absorbed objects. Our anchorage points are of three types:

Local urban structure
A regular orthogonal grid in which the presence of the diagonal stands out. Discrete building with old fragments, but reinforcing the diagonal.

Metropolitan urban structure
Intersection of two infrastructural moments at the metropolitan scale: the axis of the Hardbrücke road bridge and the layout of the railway tracks. These two lines cross at the point where our building stands.
Our building, then, as a joint, as a solid representation of the turn.
As the construction of a corner.

Overlapping both plots in the area that concerns us and prioritising the diagonal to accentuate the turn, the imprint of our building appears: an irregular hexagon.

Volumetric study
The tower, with its hexagonal base, is subject to two powerful forces that model it: the movement of the motorway that erodes one of its faces and the presence in contact of the diagonal building with which it is to form a continuous base. The two energies model the two parallel sides of the hexagon, leaving the opposite vertices to form constant dihedral angles that anchor the whole to the site.

Typology: Office Building
Competition: Finalist
Project: 2004
Surface: 50,000 m2
Location: Zürich, Switzerland