BFH Campus Bern

Client: Bern City Council

Place: Reiterstrasse 11 3011 Bern, Switzerland
Competition: 2018

Type: Education

Area: 50,000 m²

Budget: CHF 286 million

AZPML

Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Maider Llaguno-Munitxa, Ivaylo Nachev, Carlos Orihuela, Rubén Gayarre del Cerro, Maria Herrera, Raul Zurera, Stella Salta

The intricate massing of our proposal deliberately moves away from a solid massing which encloses the program into an extruded mass and attempts to break the project’s massing into a more intricate mass which exposes the necessary voids to the outside of the mass to break down the bulkiness of the mass.

The complex is aimed to reflect some of the distinguished traits from the Bern Canton. Mostly, the mixture between the natural and the artificial, and the extraordinary diversity of landscapes which are the result of a patchwork of landforms comprising the wooded hills of the Bernese Jura, a broad central plateau dotted with magnificent lakes and the rugged majesty of the Bernese Oberland. In Bern, urban life and countryside mingle with culture and landscape, tradition and modernity.

The complex is aimed to reflect some of the distinguished traits from the Bern Canton. Mostly, the mixture between the natural and the artificial, and the extraordinary diversity of landscapes which are the result of a patchwork of landforms comprising the wooded hills of the Bernese Jura, a broad central plateau dotted with magnificent lakes and the rugged majesty of the Bernese Oberland. In Bern, urban life and countryside mingle with culture and landscape, tradition and modernity.

We propose a project which is ruthlessly modern in its organizational logic and efficiency, while the material palette and detail are deliberately naturalistic and picturesque. The surfacial quality of the project will be characterized by the organic textures of the timber cladding, the natural textures of the cobblestone in the pavement and the presence of vegetation on the façades of the complex. While the parti of the project is radically simple in its geometry and organization, the detail of the façade is intricate and elaborate as if it had been made by a traditional craftsman, using perpendicular slats to withstand the protruding shelves which will reflect daylight or hold potted plants.

The vegetation of the façade connects with deeply rooted traditions in the canton, where it is common to see planters installed on the facades of buildings as a traditional form or decoration. While the geometry of the project is rigorously orthogonal and artificial, it only acts as a counterpoint for the organic forms of the plants that will cover the facades and populate the raised gardens around which the program is organized. The landscaping of these courtyards will try to provide a sample of the diverse assemblages of vegetation which populate the multiple landscapes of the Bernese geography. The vegetation itself will act as a crucial factor of differentiation of the building mass, producing different atmospheres within an efficient and flexible structure.

The fenestration of the project has been designed to optimize the environmental performance of the façade. Our proposal is to use a double band of horizontal windows, which allows to reduce the glazed area while maintaining the daylight ingress at the top of the room (the most efficient location for windows in terms of daylight provision) while providing also a lower fenestration band which will enable clear views to the outside.