Switzerland’s Cocoon: Sweeping Curves and Free-Flowing Architecture
Written by Jennifer Heyns
Have you ever felt like a worker bee buzzing around your office all day trying to get as much done as possible? Feeling like an insect may just be what the workers inside the innovatively designed office building in Zurich are experiencing - but in a good way.
The 1,900-square meter building is a series of dizzying spirals wrapped in a stainless steel wire mesh cocoon. Known simply as Cocoon, this amazing building was completed less than three years ago with a budget of nearly $9 million.
Cocoon was built in a gorgeous natural setting (much like you’d expect Switzerland to be - especially after annual viewings of The Sound of Music), with both lake and mountain views. The exterior of the structure looks like an inverted set of oval structures with steel screen around it. At night, however, with the interior lights on, the stainless steel gives off a softer affect with more of a likeness to mosquito netting.
The interior view can be a humbling and dizzying spectacle. A gently ascending spiral ramp rises from the ground to the top floor around an atrium flooded with the natural light of a tremendous series of skylights. Stand at the base of the ramp and look upward, and you’ll see an optical illusion of a giant, swirly S.
While there’s plenty of room throughout the building for offices and open space, spirals cascade at every turn, offering a visual spectacle throughout. With bright colors and white surfaces splattered inside coupled with the massive amounts of natural light, the structure is conducive to energy efficiency and high levels of employee productivity.
Though the elliptical floor plan offers closed offices toward the exterior walls, the vast open areas surrounding the main spiral ramp make communication and proximity seem quite natural.
Special attention to organized space and spatial relations was paid by Cocoon’s architects at Camenzind Evolution, who opted for a more unique floor plan than the traditional office building shape of a square with closed-off, separate horizontal stories.
The engaging design was put into place with the idea that a building that flowed so seamlessly from floor to floor would inspire communication and cooperation among the building’s tenants.
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