Designed by world-renowned architects, Herzog & de Meuron, their Pritzker prize winning project, the Signal Box, is a railway utility building in Basel, near the Guterbahnhof Wolf in Switzerland.
With an exterior cladding of copper strips that are twisted at certain places to admit daylight, the building acts as a Faraday cage protecting the electronic equipment inside from unexpected external effects. At the same time, it is also able to express vividly these physical qualities. Unlike many conventional industrial buildings, the building presents a relationship with the adjacent railway tracks.
On six floors, there is mainly electronic equipment for the control of points and signals to the depot and the related tracks, as well as a few workstations and their ancillary spaces. Its scale is open and indeterminate (floor divisions are not recognizable), so that the configuration is able to take up a specific relation with the adjacent field of railway tracks.
Words by Alison Furuto
