In a week of otherwise poor weather, on Saturday 22 October blue skies and sunshine bathed much of Switzerland. Lucky us (again!), for this was the day we had arranged for our latest Community Event – a visit to Roche’s latest “intelligent” Building 2 in Kleinbasel. Completed this year, the 205 metre-high, CHF 545 Mill. structure opened the doors to its latest offices at the heart of the company’s campus on Grenzacherstrasse.
Although the building’s footprint takes up 83,000 m2, the entire office space can accommodate up to 3,400 office workers occupying a total area of 348,000 m2. The internal architecture of the earthquake-resistant structure has been carefully themed, a pleasant environment that includes not just multiple workstations, but restaurants, a 3-storey-high communication area, lounges and chill-out spaces – even a vertical garden in the lofty entrance hall!
In all, the building has 16 lifts, each of which feeds electrical energy back into the grid when they descend. Numbers for our one-hour members tour were strictly limited, and we began by taking a fast but super-silent ascent to the 47th floor. From the restaurant there we took in the stupendous vista over the entire Basel 
region are. To the north, the Black Forest; the west, the Vosges mountains, and to the south, the Jura range. Only cloud further south over the Alps obscured sight of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.
Maybe we could ask for a return visit so that more of our members and friends can see this architectural masterpiece sometime in the future???