The building serves the fully automated storage of herbal sweets. Seen from the outside and from a distance, the building reveals itself as a singular unified whole, as something that one could understand as a storage building. The Eternit panels, larger at the top than at the bottom, make up the cladding and underline the difference between the lower part, where innumerable individual foundations support the façade construction, and the upper part, where a cantilevering timber construction reveals the galvanized sheet-metal box on the building’s inside.
Visual references are also made to the traditional stacking of sawn timber boards around the numerous saw mills of the area, as well as to the limestone quarry within which the storage building sits. The foundation beams have been left exposed. Layers of construction have been left visible so that the basic cladding of galvanized sheet metal can be seen with the loading bay. The image of the stacking of planks is seen on approaching the building; every element of the cladding is a kind of storage frame wherein parts of the façade are “stored“, just as goods are stored in the building’s interior.
Herzog & de Meuron, 1988
CITY Laufen
COUNTRY Switzerland
Laufen, in the Swiss canton of Jura, is best known outside the country for being the headquarters of the famous throat lozenge manufacturer Ricola. A new warehouse was required to automate the storage of lozenges and medicinal herbs. The starting point for a commission that basically involved designing an enclosure and deciding on its location was a 60 x 26 x 17 metre parallelepiped, governed by the dimensions of the shelf measurements. The stone wall of the neighboring abandoned quarry suggested an appropriate backdrop for the new unit, which was positioned close to this boundary to create a loading bay area with the rest of the factory. The enclosure of the building is inspired by the piles of freshly sawn wooden boards that are found in the sawmills of the surrounding Laufen valley.
The building structure as such consists of metal ribs anchored to the concrete slab, which hold a series of parallel wooden supports with small consoles. Fibrecement sheeting is screwed onto this wooden grid backing in a vertical and horizontal arrangement to provide the cool, dry environment required to store the merchandise. On the basis of the standard size of the shelving units, the facades are divided into three strata with five belts each. The top zone uses the panels in their standard manufactured size, while the width of the lower zones is the result of dividing it in accordance with the proportions of the golden section. The largest piece is in the intermediate part of the elevation and the smallest piece at the bottom, imposing a cadence on the facade with the nuance of gravity and the weight of the stacked merchandise.
As a finish for this succession of horizontal belts, the wooden backing juts out from above the top belt with a bracket construction that holds a pronounced fibrecement eave. Behind this dizzying succession of strips we see the zinc sheeting that hides the thermal insulation on a rear plane, insisting on the interpretation of the enclosure as ‘a garment’ for the warehouse. The mineral origin of the chosen material, which duplicates the surrounding jagged peaks of the Jura, and the two-dimensional format reflecting the wooden boards at the local sawmills, all contextualize the otherwise universal, anonymous assemblage of standardised shelving, producing a louvered envelope that breathes with the ease promised by the lozenges stored inside.
Ricola Storage Building是一座位于瑞士Laufen市的仓库建筑，由Herzog & de Meuron建筑事务所设计。该建筑以周边木材厂的木板为灵感，结合周边山峦的矿物元素，设计出了一个具有独特外观和功能的建筑。建筑整体外观呈现水平条带状，每个条带上覆盖着纤维水泥板。这些条带的宽度根据黄金比例进行分配，最底部的条带最窄，而最上面的条带则使用标准的制造尺寸。建筑结构由金属肋骨和木制支撑组成，纤维水泥板用螺丝固定在木制支撑上。建筑外观上的条带和木制支撑的设计，不仅使建筑外观具有独特的美感，也为仓库内提供了良好的储存环境。
这座仓库建筑在设计中充分考虑了周边环境的特点和建筑本身的功能需求，是一个典型的功能与美学相结合的设计案例。
