Roche Tower
Roche Tower, also called Building 1, is an office skyscraper in Basel, Switzerland. It was designed by Herzog & de Meuron for the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche. The tower is 178 meters tall with 41 floors and, when it opened, was the tallest building in Switzerland, surpassing Zürich’s Prime Tower by 52 meters. It has about 74,200 square meters of floor space and cost around CHF 550 million. Around 2,000 employees work there.
Construction began on 9 May 2012, and the building officially opened on 18 September 2015. In 2020, Building 2 nearby reached 205 meters, becoming the tallest structure in Basel and taller than Roche Tower.
The tower sits on 143 piles up to 24 meters deep, with a foundation slab designed for earthquakes. Basel is in a high earthquake risk area, and the building is engineered to withstand a magnitude 6.9 quake, higher than the legal requirement.
Design features include a closed-cavity facade for easier cleaning and solar shading while keeping outward visibility, a well-insulated envelope, LED lighting with daylight-based controls, and automated systems for lighting, ventilation, heating, and cooling. The heating and cooling use groundwater cooling and waste-heat recovery to save energy. The address is Grenzacherstrasse 124, Basel.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:33 (CET).