Basel, Switzerland
“We want to equip a workspace with personality, diversity, freedom, and flexibility in order to provide a positive experience for Roche’s employees and invite the local community to participate,” said studio co-founder Emanuel Christ.
Swiss studio Christ & Gantenbein has created a new line of office furniture that aims to give staff more freedom and flexibility than a traditional workplace.
The furniture was custom built by the Basel-based INCHfurniture for Christ & Gantenbein’s new Roche Pharma AG headquarters in Grenzach-Wyhlen called “Fritz project.”
The new furniture line playfully departs from the glass, concrete, and metal aesthetic with pink plastic, exposed plywood sheets, moveable pink terrazzo meeting steps, and colorfully upholstered midcentury modern chairs.
The palette is seemingly more refined at ground level, employing a range of dark blue shades, but the overall effect is intended to help Roche employees stay relaxed and encourage hybrid working—FRITZ isn’t set up for workers to hunker down at their desks all day.
With flexibility at its core, the new furniture and interiors enhance the non-digital exchange between individuals, groups, and the firm as a whole, and embodies deep sustainability transferable to a variety of applications.
It simultaneously allows for both individualized workspaces and informal interactions in a professional environment. It is, quite simply, a reason to come to work.
The functional and comfortable furniture allows for diverse gatherings, from the customizable 550 seat auditorium which can be partitioned into three individual halls, down to areas for hyper-concentrated, individual work, providing a canvas for direct, authentic, and non-digital exchange in an inclusive and non-hierarchical setting.
Individual workspaces, adjustable desks, and enclosed zones for privacy are mingled with conference rooms dispersed throughout the open floorplan.
The Multifunctional Workspace Building offers answers by providing an alternative to the traditional office and home office: it brings people together in a workspace that is more than a conventional office and that epitomizes the architectural translation of the cultural shift of the “New Ways of Working.”
Project: modular office furniture
Architects: Christ & Gantenbein
Manufacturer: INCHfurniture
