Akara Tower - E

HISTORY/LOCATION

In a central location between the cities of Zurich, Basel and Bern, the town of Baden (Aargau canton) is one of the six strongest economic regions in Switzerland. With nearly 20,000 inhabitants, Baden is an attractive place to live and work.

Real estate service provider HRS Real Estate AG has now built the Akara Tower, the tallest building in Baden, at Brown Boveri Platz 4, just north of the town centre. The high-rise stands on the site of a former ABB haulage depot and enjoys a superb location. Baden railway station is just a five-minute walk away, and the A1/A3 motorway can be reached in seven minutes.

CONCEPT/ARCHITECTURE

Standing at an imposing height of 68 metres, and with 19 floors, the Akara Tower is a Baden landmark. The building boasts outstanding architecture. The star-shaped, overheight ground-floor design, with two separate entrance halls, makes the most of its setting, creating canopy-like covered forecourts in front of the entrances.

Four lifts provide access from the grand, 6-metre-high entrance hall to the other floors. Two of the lifts are for the offices, and two for the apartments. The first three floors comprise a total of 2,200  m2 of office space and service areas. The business premises have a loft-style design and plenty of flexibility in terms of room layout and expansion options. The spaces on offer range from 160 m² to 2,100 m².

The 15 floors above contain 150 high-quality rental apartments, 10 per floor, ranging from compact 1.5-room apartments to spacious 4.5-room properties. The larger apartments have recessed balconies, while the smaller ones have living and dining areas that can be opened up with sliding windows. On the 20th floor, a panoramic roof terrace wraps around the set-back green roof, with clear views over the town of Baden and the surrounding hills. The Akara Tower combines urban living and modern working to impressive effect.

On the ground floor, the entrance halls, lift lobbies and corridors all have exposed concrete walls. From the second floor, a skeleton construction method was used for the building, with flat ceilings, a service core made of castin-place concrete and prefabricated concrete supports in the apartments. The façade is covered in dark brown panels made of aluminium sheeting.

SPECIAL FEATURES

An installation site in the enclosed garage was completed before the main building, thus mitigating spatial issues. The many undocumented supply cables proved to be something of a challenge. In addition, the ongoing operation of the ABB halls had to be ensured at all times. As a special construction measure, climbing formwork was used for the lift/stairwell core. The ‘lean construction’ allowed construction processes to be implemented extremely efficiently, with the result that the building was handed over two months earlier than planned.

ENERGY CONCEPT/SUSTAINABILITY

The Akara Tower meets the highest standards of sustainability and economic efficiency. Controlled ventilation of indoor spaces in line with Minergie label requirements uses a central supply and exhaust air monoblocs with heat recovery. The high-rise is connected to the district heating network of Regionalwerke Baden, which supplies environmentally friendly thermal energy from wood chips, the Turgi waste incineration plant and groundwater heat pumps. Within the Akara Tower, heat is distributed via an underfloor heating system.