St Jakob Stiftung is a foundation that gives disabled people a diverse range of employment opportunities, from work in the famous bakery, to woodworking and facilities management. The design for St Jakob’s new building in Zurich West collects these uses into a compact volume that responds to a collection of loose existing structures along a major railway viaduct in this previously industrial area of the city. The building has a differentiated volume, making a formal, stepped façade to Heinrichstrasse and has looser profiles to the other sides of the site. The building’s volume accentuates its object quality at the same time as making connections to the industrial structures nearby.
The project is intended to have the qualities of a working building; open, robust and with large window openings that allow light to penetrate the deep floors. While gentrification has started to break this part of the city’s relationship with its industrial past, the form and the programme of the foundation’s new building goes some way towards bridging these two worlds.
The building is as compact as possible; larger floors house the bakery and packing departments at the base of the building and a stack of four smaller floors accommodate other facilities above. The south, west and east faces of the building are lined with balconies made in fine, repeated pre-cast concrete elements. Part palazzo, part warehouse, the front façade of the building onto Heinrichstrasse is clad in pre-cast concrete plates that stretch from floor to floor with a cast relief of shells, the symbol of St Jakob. In these ways the building shares some qualities with the cast-iron buildings of downtown New York.
Project data
- Ref.
- JG0725
- Architect
- Caruso St John Architects (Adam Caruso, Peter St John, Michael Schneider, Florian Zierer)
- Location
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Client
- Stiftung Behindertenwerk St. Jakob
- Structural engineering
- Conzett Bronzini Partner
- Services / MEP
- Kalt & Halbeisen Ingenieurbüro AG, Pfiffner AG
- Collaborators
- enerpeak AG (Electrical), BAKUS AG (Building Physics), Amstein+Walthert (Fire & Security), Streuli Bau AG (Concrete Structure), Elementwerk Istighofen (Prefabricated Concrete)
- Contractor
- HRS Real Estate AG
- Design
- 2013
- Construction
- 2013–2018
- Area
- 10.900 m²
- Budget
- 26m CHF
- Photography
- © Jesús Granada, 2019
- Project architects
- Florian Summa (2013–2015), Annina Meier (2015–2018)
- Project team
- Veronika Bonora, Robert Chandler, Christoph Dörrig, Laura Favre-Bully, Philipp Knorr, Kristina Grigorjeva, Adriana Müller, Moritz Puerckhauer, Isabelle Rütimann, Simon Schankula
