After a construction period of almost five years, Swatch has inaugurated its new headquarters in Biel, which features one of the world’s largest timber structures, designed by the Japanese starchitect – Shigeru Ban. Heralding a new chapter in the history of the brand, this building defies current conventions, just like the watches that are created there.

Born in 1957 in Tokyo and winner of the 2014 Pritzker Prize, Shigeru Ban is known for his delicate structures and unconventional methods as well as his decisive contribution to innovation and humanity in architecture. Swatch Group collaborated with the architect for the first time on the Nicolas G. Hayek Center in Tokyo that opened in 2007.

In 2011, his design won the Swatch Group’s architectural competition for the construction of the new Swatch Headquarters, the new Omega Manufacture, and the Cité du Temps, particularly convincing with its original yet pragmatic concept as well as the ability to respect the brand-specific spirit for each of these buildings. Moreover, Shigeru Ban had taken the existing landscape and buildings into account and integrated them into the overall project.

The buildings share a design language, material palette, and environmental ethos, reflecting the unified brands of Swatch and Omega while expressing each building’s individuality through contrasting structural forms. The Swatch Headquarters is playful, innovative, and provocative. In contrast, the Omega Factory is a strict, precise, and rigid rectilinear building. Its clean-room construction is unprecedented for a timber building. Cité du Temps acts as an interface between Swatch and Omega both figuratively and physically: the building intersects with the Swatch Headquarters’ canopy.

The vaulted façade with an area of over 11,000 square meters rises gently towards the entrance and transitions to the Cité du Temps. Both the exterior and interior of the building are interspersed with a variety of leitmotifs, with curved shapes, colors and transparency, as well as with the unusual use of classic materials and building elements.

A timber framework (grid shell) construction forms the basic structure of the large-area façade. The material was chosen for its ecological and sustainable properties. Wood can also be processed flexibly and cut to extremely precise sizes – important properties for a construction where every millimeter is important. During the planning phase, modern 3D technology helped to define the exact shape and positioning of the approximately 4,600 beams of the timber grid shell.

The 7,700 timber pieces forming the grid-shell roof of the Swatch building were engineered with a precision of 0.1 millimeters. According to the architecture studio, the watchmaker’s campus centers on a 240-metre-long timber vault – one of the largest wooden structures in Europe and the overall design is “playful, innovative and provocative” and demonstrates the capabilities of timber construction at a large scale.

The transparent element is made of glass. A total of four glass panes were used for thermal insulation, between which a white roller blind is embedded. These elements are always lightly ventilated to prevent condensation from forming. A total of nine balconies ranging in size from 10 to 20 square meters provide views over several floors. Tiny white dots on the glass façades serve as sun protection. In addition, 124 wooden Swiss crosses on the ceiling improve the acoustics in the offices thanks to their fine perforations.

The basement extends under the entire length of the building. In addition to the technical rooms, ventilation center and archive, it also houses the underground car park, with 170 car parking spaces and 182 bicycle parking spaces. Clever use of groundwater to heat and cool the building and solar power from the photovoltaic system make a significant contribution to an optimum C02 balance.

Looking out onto Nicolas G. Hayek Street, the entirely glazed entrance area features generous dimensions as well as a sense of transparency, openness and lightness. While its zigzag shape stems from the timber grid frame of the façade, it also plays a role in the building physics, for example in relation to wind loads. This zigzag glazing begins at a height of 5.5 meters and extends to a height of 22 meters.

Below the glazing, glass shutters – known best for their industrial applications – open and close automatically: in fact, they are glass ‘blinds’ that have to be able to withstand wind and rain and be adequately insulated. Two glass elevators take employees and visitors to the upper floors and to the glass pedestrian bridge on the third floor, which connects the Swatch building to the Cité du Temps. Galleries on three floors offer views of the entrance area.

In addition to the ecological benefits of wood, the Swatch and Omega Campus has numerous other environmentally-conscious strategies. To achieve low energy consumption and a better working environment, state-of-the-art technologies such as radiative cooling and heating with activated ceiling panels are employed, as well as water pipes cast into concrete slabs, which allows for draft-free air conditioning.

Groundwater is used as a heat source in order to achieve a significant reduction of both heating and cooling power. The roofs of all three buildings are equipped with photovoltaic panels. Each technological strategy introduced into the project is intended to reduce the building’s impact on the planet, and also serve as a benchmark for all buildings in the future.

442 individually manufactured, curved solar elements were inserted into the honeycomb structure of the façade. With 1,770m2 of installed photovoltaics, around 212.3 MWh of electricity are generated per year, which corresponds to the average annual consumption of 61 Swiss households.

Also designed by Shigeru Ban, the Cité du Temps, measuring 80 x 17 x 28 meters, forms an independent architectural unit that perfectly complements the Swatch building. Each of its 14 arcades has a span of 15 meters and is 5 meters wide. The Cité du Temps hosts both the Omega Museum, located on the first floor, as well as PLANET SWATCH on the second floor. The Nicolas G. Hayek Conference Hall on the fourth floor, which is reserved for Swatch Group, stands out with its elliptical shape.

At 46,778 square meters , this project is the largest and most exuberant hybrid mass timber project by Shigeru Ban Architects to date, and one of the largest hybrid mass timber projects in the world. Through his disaster relief work, Shigeru Ban has experienced firsthand the direct impact of climate change and natural disasters causing adverse effects on both people and the planet.

Climate change is a reality that must be addressed both in how we live and how we build: our individual decisions to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions can change the world. However, building construction in its current state does not responsibly consider the future and well-being of our planet. To this end, Shigeru Ban Architects promotes building in wood as a model for environmental consciousness. Although timber is one of the oldest building materials, it is also one that holds much promise for the future.