Siemens Restaurants

By Redazione The Plan - 11 January 2010

The Siemens Restaurants, built following a successful architectural design competition, represent a new generation of staff catering facilities. The building concept reaches beyond just providing subsidised food, to reflect an all-encompassing understanding of people’s needs during their working day. In addition to offering a wide selection of different foods, the variety of dining environments within the building enables visitors to choose where they wish to eat according to their mood on any given day. The building concept acknowledges people's desire to relax and recharge in their lunch hour. The fully glazed facade provides restorative, uninterrupted views of the water feature and modern landscaped gardens surrounding the building, while outdoor terraces invite relaxing al fresco summer eating.
Although open to the public, the building located at Siemens Zurich Headquarters, mainly caters for the company’s 1,500 staff. The building contains three restaurants - ‘Move,’ ‘Relax’ and ‘First' - as well as a cafeteria named ‘Point.’ Together these catering facilities can seat 700 people at any one time. As the restaurants serve up to 1,500 meals every lunchtime, seamless, efficient workflow was a major design brief requirement. Added to that, tight budget constraints demanded that building volume be kept to an absolute minimum. The architectural solution was to split this minimal volume into three sections, setting them against one another in a staggered fashion. Precise overlapping and intersecting of these volumes create natural entrance areas as well as outdoor and indoor spaces. To underscore the longitudinal development of the three building units, the ends of each section consist of foldable sliding glazed doors, connecting the internal spaces directly with the outside terraces of the landscaped gardens. The structure itself is a two-pin...