Roche Tower 2, Office skyscraper in Basel, Switzerland.
Roche Tower 2 is an office building in Basel with 50 floors and a height of 205 meters. The structure consists of reinforced concrete and steel and stands alongside the earlier Roche Tower 1 along the Rhine riverside since 2022.
Roche announced a second, taller tower in October 2014, and demolition of older buildings on the site began in November 2016. The cantonal parliament of Basel-Stadt approved construction in June 2016 by 84 votes to two, part of a CHF 3 billion investment in the Basel campus. Work on the structure started in early 2019; it reached its full 205 m height in December 2020 and was inaugurated on 2 September 2022.
The tower is part of the Roche complex along the Rhine and shapes Basel's skyline with its modern presence. It shows how a major pharmaceutical company has become embedded in the city and transformed the character of the area.
The tower stands on the Roche campus in the Wettstein quarter, near the Rhine. It is a working office building with around 3,200 employees and flexible shared workspaces rather than fixed desks, so it is seen from outside. The ground floor holds a vertical garden by botanist Patrick Blanc.
The building is specifically engineered to withstand earthquakes up to magnitude 6.9 and uses an advanced engineering system for this purpose. This technology is unusual for a location in Switzerland and shows the high safety standards of its construction.
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