In Basel, Valerio Olgiati designs the Baloise Insurance Company Office Tower, where pentagonal columns shaped like houses carry horizontal concrete slabs in an exposed shelf structure.
The office tower is a building type that has, since the late nineteenth century, resisted formal invention. Developers want efficiency; tenants want flexibility; cities want density. What remains, typically, is a glass box on a podium. In Basel, Valerio Olgiati takes a different position: the tower becomes a concrete shelf, its structure externalized and given a shape that reads as both primitive and specific.
The columns are the move. Each one is cast in pigmented concrete with a pentagonal cross-section, its profile forming the silhouette of a simple house, pitched roof and all. These house-columns carry deep horizontal floor plates that extend outward like shelves, creating a rhythm of mass and void across the facade. Structural engineer Patrick Gartmann worked with Olgiati to make this legible: load paths are visible, forces are expressed.
The concrete itself carries a brown-mauve pigment that shifts tone across the day. Exterior surfaces show a smooth formwork finish with subtle board marks, while interior columns reveal a finer texture. At ground level, the building lifts on its columns to create covered passages, a permeable threshold between the street and the glazed lobby. The effect is less corporate plaza than urban cloister.
Inside, the ground floor program includes meeting rooms enclosed in bronze-framed glass, their walls independent of the structure that passes through them. Terrazzo floors and egg-crate metal ceilings establish a material discipline that continues the rigor of the exterior. Barcelona chairs in white leather sit against the brown concrete, a deliberate reference to the canon of modern furniture placed against a building that refuses modernism's transparency.
Olgiati has spent decades arguing that buildings should generate new forms rather than repeat existing ones. The Baloise tower is a demonstration of that thesis applied to a program that usually defeats such ambitions: the corporate office. The house-shaped column is not a symbol; it is a structural element that happens to carry symbolic weight. That distinction matters.
