New Biozentrum at the University of Basel

The new Biozentrum at the University of Basel has been under construction – not always without delays – since 2013. The 72-metre-high glass and chrome tower was finally opened recently. The Zurich-based firm Ilg Santer Architekten was responsible for the architecture.

The Biozentrum at the University of Basel was founded in 1971 and since then researchers have been working on the fundamentals of biomedicine with great success. This is evidenced, for example, by the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1978, awarded to the microbiologist Werner Arber, who was researching there at the time, in addition to numerous other scientific prizes.

Photo: Daisuke Hirabayashi

The Basel Biozentrum does not shy away from superlatives. Not even when it comes to the new building. In his opening speech, Director Alexander Schier described the building as “the most modern research building in the world, technically and visually a masterpiece”.

The cuboid building, designed by Ilg Santer Architekten, is 72 meters high and its modern and minimalist glass and chrome façade references the technology and research inside. On 16 upper floors and three basement floors, there are 23,440 square meters of space for lecture halls, research laboratories, seminar rooms and more. A total of 400 researchers and 900 students will be able to research and learn in the university’s new Biocenter.

The floor plan in the middle of the building can be designed to be as open as possible thanks to a special configuration of the load-bearing structure, in which there are no other conductors for vertical forces apart from the façade columns, the building services and four load-bearing cores. This creates an unusually high degree of flexibility in the room layout. The Vierendeel framework absorbs the horizontal forces.

Scientific research takes place on the top ten floors of the new Biozentrum at the University of Basel. There is space for up to four research departments per floor, which are connected by a shared meeting room. The lower floors house facilities such as the computer center, workshops and laboratories.

In the over 1,500 square meter and 13 meter high entrance hall of the Biocenter, functional units such as the canteen, lecture halls and library are combined in one space. The architects see the entrance hall as a forum for the campus that is open to the public. This is why the cafeteria and a store can also be found here, for example.

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