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Rolex Learning Center / EPFL by Sanaa ©2010 Hisao Suzuki

Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The CHF110 million Rolex Learning Center at EPFL in Lausanne opens officially Monday 22 February. The 21st century education center is notable for its waves of floors without stairs and ceilings seemingly without support columns. It has Swiss cheese-like holes in the roof for light and aeration. The building is quite simply extraordinary to behold, and time will tell if its innovative design is as functionally pleasing as architects of the Japanese firm Sanaa promise.

The center is more than just an unusual building visually and functionally: in keeping with the work of EPFL into materials and processes research, the Rolex Learning Center has been built using several new construction methods.

Students, faculty and visitors who enter the building Monday will find a center which acknowledges that traditional learning methods and materials have been replaced by group work, using interactive and digital tools.

Space requirements are very different from in the past, when a university offered mainly classrooms, laboratories and quiet libraries with stacks.

Rolex Learning Center / EPFL by Sanaa ©2010 Hisao Suzuki

Rolex Learning Center / EPFL by Sanaa ©2010 Hisao Suzuki

EPFL describes its new jewel thus:”spread over one single fluid space of 20,000 sq metres, it provides a seamless network of services, libraries, information gathering, social spaces, spaces to study, restaurants, cafes and beautiful outdoor spaces.” The university has some 4,000 researchers and 7,000 students.

Architects with a clean sense of the future

Sanaa‘s founders, architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, won the EPFL contract in 2007. Their architecture has been described by the Lausanne-based Swiss polytechnic university as marrying “aesthetic simplicity with technical complexity.” The two paired up in 1995 to open Sanaa and since then their projects have included the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion in London, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa in Japan. Their Louvre-Lens project in France opens in 2012.

Pioneers in construction

Moving from the Sanaa design to building the new center required an unusual level of collaboration and problem-solving from the team that included Sanaa, Losinger in Lausanne as the general contractor, and scores of other companies. In particular the large, curved concrete shells that are the signature of the building are experimental and required enormous precision in the building process, once the calculations to arrive at the final shape were made.

Financing stayed within contractual limits

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The building cost only slightly more than the contractual agreement for CHF110 million, within the limits for overrun, says EPFL. It was financed with a mix of federal, cantonal and private money, and adhered to one of the principles of the contract, that if costs were overrun they must be reduced elsewhere in the project by the same amount. Sanaa and the construction companies were given a little over two year to deliver the project, a deadline they met. EPFL graduate and founder of Logitech, Daniel Borel, provided the money for the architectural competition to start the project and Rolex, which has a close research working relationship with EPFL is the main provider of funds for the new building, joined by Credit Suisse, Nestlé, Novartis et Sicpa.

Background:

“EPFL green light for Rolex Learning Center”, GenevaLunch feature, 30 July 2007

“EPFL’s Rolex Learning Center lays foundation stone“, 13 February 2008