Office Building near Basel
The building has neither a cellar nor a roof and yet these two elements were initially our main concern. How should the building touch the ground in a place that was not just a building site but a marvelous, park-like garden? And how should it “stop”? Should we simply cut the building off at the top, like so many other postwar structures of modernism, or put a proper saddleback roof on it to match most of the other buildings in the neighbourhood? We soon realized that what we really wanted was a roof landscape and not a conventionally monolithic roof because the idea of a “roofscape” would greatly enhance the potential of developing living patterns that move from inside to outside. The final shape of the segmented roofscape offers many more views and unexpected vistas, which would not have been possible with a traditional roof. But at the same time, this unconventional roofscape is quite distinct from the glass body of the building below and resonates with the proportions of the other buildings in the neighbourhood.
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