Helvetia Extension West opens.
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The four-storey office building forms the new main entrance and offers 130 new workspaces. It appears to be lifted in the air, resting on two cones, and thereby creates a spacious covered forecourt in front of the entrance.
The extension of the head office, west wing, is the last stage of a project for which Herzog & de Meuron won a competition in 1989. It consists of four structures docked onto the ends of each wing of the existing cruciform complex erected in the 1970s. The extensions give the existing building a new quality. Each extension has a singular character, there is no division in “old” and “new”, all structures become one entity. This compact solution also allows the building to carefully blend into the topography and the existing residential area.
With this opening, the close cooperation between Helvetia and Herzog & de Meuron has reached an important milestone. And this cooperation continues in Basel where Helvetia has assigned Herzog & de Meuron to convert its Basel head office into a Campus.
