5 Years In The Making,

after winning a competition to design a campus of timber buildings,

 to house the headquarters of watch brands Swatch and Omega in Biel, Switzerland,  

the building looking like the skin of a snake by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, last week had it's inaugural ceremony,

 the new Swatch building breaks with the conventions of classic office building architecture and blends harmoniously into the urban environment. A timber grid shell forms the basic structure, a material chosen for its ecological and sustainable properties, but also because  the area is known for its timber engineering school, 124 wooden Swiss crosses on the ceiling improve the acoustics in the offices thanks to their fine perforations,

 Two glass elevators take employees and visitors to the upper floors and to the glass pedestrian bridge on the 3rd floor, which connects the Swatch building to the Cité du Temps,

2nd floor offices,

 in addition to the regular workplaces, various common areas are distributed throughout the building,

the glass pedestrian bridge on the 3rd floor, which connects the Swatch building to the Cité du Temps, an independent architectural unit also designed by Shigeru Ban that hosts both the Omega Museum as well as PLANET SWATCH, the approximately 4,600 beams of the timber grid shell were all sourced locally, and amazingly amount to roughly 10 hours of growth of Switzerland’s entire tree population, You can read more about the project on Shigeru Ban’s website, as well as on Swatch, what a totally unique design.