Schlieren, a suburb of Zurich, is home to a cluster of commodity life science labs. The VerticalLab project crowns the residential development Rietpark close to the urban rail train station. The owner aims to create a relatively small but attractive stand-alone lab and office building in an park setting. At the time of writing the results of the architectural competition have been announced.

A small floorplate of 570m2 with a single, off-center service and shafts core. The floors can be outfitted in various combinations of lab and office space, with the labs generally adjacent to the core. The position of the core creates a lobby between one of its sides and the exterior wall. The distance from the core to the façade correlates with the generously wide write-up lab zone. Generous arrival and circulation zones on typical floors are matched by a generous quasi-public space of the ground floor that extends beyond the façade to the canopied outdoor space, “the tea pavilion in the park.” The project is visibly not burdened by the efficiency pressures. One imagines dignified scientific research and invention work taking place in the spacious glazed labs and offices filled with daylight. If desired, circulation spaces on each floor can be connected with additional stairs to other floors through the specially designed removable slabs. An exterior fire egress balcony circles the floors.

Two inconveniently narrow and deep passenger lifts open into a lift lobby that is unexpectedly substantially narrower than the lift depth. The lift lobby leads on the façade side to yet another lobby along the façade. This second lobby with the view, presumably the nicer of the two, curiously serves as the freight lobby for the chemicals lift.   

The 7m structural module works well for labs with 90cm deep furniture. The same structural grid size forces a 3.5m office grid resulting in excessively wide single offices even when compared to the generous 10 foot or 3m wide standard US single office.

Based on the published plans, floor plate area ist 570m2, core ca. 75m2, resulting in 495m2 of net useable per floor or 85% of useable with 15% of core area, an absolutely unrealistic efficiency ratio for lab buildings.

12 mixed use floors above grade including top technical floor, one underground floor. Floor to floor heights of 4m result in 48m of total building hight.

Concrete post-and-beam skeleton structure tied into concrete core so that the slab can be removed in any of the floor modules to provide additional vertical connections between the floors. Column raster along the long is 3.5m on the perimeter and 7m inside the floor plate. The short side has a raster of 5.8m.

Service shafts are tucked into shallow niches on three sides of the core. At the current stage of the project the shafts as well as the entire core seem to be sized optimistically small, particularly if much of the floor area would be occupied as lab.

With one central core and skeletal structure the floors provide the absolute freedom for floor fitout analogue the classic office shell-and-cores.

A square core seemingly free-floating within a rectangular floor plate. In fact, the core is pushed from the facades to its fixed position by a balance of invisible pressures of well-calibrated functional spans. As wide as the depth of the labs attached to its sides, the core’s distance from the facades is defined by the depth of the office on on side and of the write-ups on the other.

VerticalLab makes the impression of a beautiful small trophy research building. One can imagine a mailbox HQ of a small, well-capitalized pharma company housed here rather than an up-and-coming cash strapped start-up. It is difficult to estimate the user value of removable slab in all areas of all floors, factoring in the additional costs of a load-bearing structure with moment connections required in the absence of a rigid slab. A spacious ground floor with three entrance lobbies and a large wooden “skirt” is yet another feature which, while not being directly monetizable, lends the project a certain curb appeal aimed at raising the overall project value.     

Project: 2023, expected realization 2027

12 floors at 570m2 per floor result in ca. 6’840m2 total above grade area

11’600m2 total declared building area is not apparently reconcilable with the calculation above, even taking into account the relatively large underground floor

Owner: Geistlich Immobilia AG

Architect: Waldrap AG, Zürich