Herzog & de Meuron and Ricola are a team that has enriched Swiss industrial building culture with many a model structure. The new Kräuterzentrum (herbal centre) near Basle, which the architects developed jointly with Martin Rauch, the Vorarlberg earth construction expert, is probably the largest loam building in Europe to date. Here, one of the oldest forms of construction in the world is applied in an age of system building and prefabrication.
The outer walls consist of a total of 666 rammed earth units, each weighing up to five tonnes. Their massive character may be surprising for an industrial development, but it ensures a relatively constant indoor climate throughout the year for the storage of the ingredients that the company traditionally uses in its famous Swiss herbal confectionery.
Many details of the building skin are oriented to the physical properties of the construction material, from the circular windows to the minimal roof projection. Within the cubic volume, though, the logic of linear operating sequences dominates. All this begins only a few millimetres behind the external walls, where the building is stabilized by a powerful reinforced concrete skeleton frame against wind loads and earth tremors.
The outer walls consist of a total of 666 rammed earth units, each weighing up to five tonnes. Their massive character may be surprising for an industrial development, but it ensures a relatively constant indoor climate throughout the year for the storage of the ingredients that the company traditionally uses in its famous Swiss herbal confectionery.
Many details of the building skin are oriented to the physical properties of the construction material, from the circular windows to the minimal roof projection. Within the cubic volume, though, the logic of linear operating sequences dominates. All this begins only a few millimetres behind the external walls, where the building is stabilized by a powerful reinforced concrete skeleton frame against wind loads and earth tremors.