HdM Does High-rise

Cisar reports about the unveiling of a tower for Roche, a health-care company, by Herzog & de Meuron. If built, the tower would be located in Basel and would be Switzerland's tallest building. Estimated completion is 2011.



This design follows from the recent trend of torquing, twisting, and spiraling towers, particularly those of Santiago Calatrava. Here, the result is not so much mathematical in nature but in response to zoning requirements, program, organization, and a series of voids that traverse the tower, per this diagram. In some ways, this trend is born from the attempt to distinguish certain designs from others, but the more they are created the more they tend to resemble each other.

More photos are available in scisar's flickr set on HdM.

(via Archinect)