Caruso St John Zürich goes big on impact with ice hockey stadium

In Caruso St John’s Zürich office, there’s a very large disco ball hanging in the newly-created gym. It’s unlike any one I’ve ever been to but here – as you’d expect – the bar bells are exactly in size order, a callisthenics scaffold standing against a backdrop of muted yellows, greens and greys. Dividing its bistro from the office proper, the gym is most notable because, although it’s lunchtime, it’s conspicuously empty; staff must either be getting their calorific intake from the day’s hearty, sweet potato soup, or burning the aforesaid more industriously in front of their computer screens.

But whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working. I’m here to see the firm’s new ice hockey stadium, one of the mostly commercial projects that, since the 2011 founding of its Zurich satellite, Caruso St John has been focussing on. Its 2013 Europaallee Baufeld E competition win, an award-winning mixed-use development south of the main station, holds its own alongside work by Chipperfield and Wiel Arets. Comprising two towers of high-end apartments on a triangular podium, at its Loos-ian apex a scalloped, coloured concrete facade offers dignified ornament to the nefarious Langstrasse.

The scallop theme continues at its offices for St Jakob Foundation, a mental health ‘help-to-work’ charity whose trainee bakers flow through palazzo-like walls, and where the foundation’s shell logo has been playfully ‘baked’ onto its concrete cladding panels. Things are more uncompromising at the six-storey Escher-Wyss Platz offices, where hefty side cantilevers reflect the city’s Hardbrücke elevated highway in front. Green-hued concrete may help mitigate the severity, but it takes the cantilevers’ deep planters to supply any softness. CSTJ partner Michael Schneider, who has returned to Zürich from London, admits that such commercial work and the contacts it generates keep this office running, leaving London free to concentrate on the arts projects it made its name with. But whether the gym’s disco ball was the idea of Schneider or his co-partner Florian Zierer, you sense an aspiration to engage in more sportive – even ‘fun’ – projects.

At least one of these aspects has been addressed with the office’s Swiss Life Arena in the Zürich suburb of Altstetten, further down the tracks from the Europaallee project. In terms of distance and size, this scheme pulls up short of the gargantuan 1985 high-tech Swiss Post building by Swiss architect Theo Hotz. A competition-winning ice hockey stadium for home team ZSC Lions, it is, at 70,000m² and 480,000m³, in many ways just as imposing – and is significantly larger – than anything the practice has done before. The 170m by 110m footprint alone reportedly required billionaire club president Walter Frey not only to lobby the Swiss government for both the building and its siting, but also to have the city authority clear almost a third of its Vulkan allotments on the site’s west side to make way for it.

Schneider says the firm coined Bobby Charlton’s adage about Old Trafford – ‘Theatre of Dreams’ – for its entry. Although most modern football stadiums, emphasising revenue and corporate entertainment, tend rather to resemble hotels or conference centres, he explains that the title was about remaining mindful of ‘sports’ sense of illusion and emotion’. This was aided in part by the specific nature of the hockey spectacle – one carried out under lights in a dark, highly insulated box. ‘Our idea was for a simple and archaic typology,’ explains Schneider, ‘but we also had to structure the facade without easy reference to classical motifs.’

Luckily, Adam Caruso spent his youth in Canada playing ice hockey and his architect years playing with classical motifs, so for him the project was a shoo-in. The firm ran with the idea of a ‘cast curtain’ – inspired by the elegant sophistry of 18th century Guards’ Tents at Drottningholm Royal Palace in Sweden, where painted copper structures give the impression of being made of fabric. The scallop form found in many of the firm’s  Swiss projects has also returned writ super-large here, as the unifying motif for this complex of a Swiss National League and training rinks, 12,000 spectator seats, restaurants, corporate boxes, club shop and administrative spaces, car park and rental offices – brought together in CSTJ’s huge, insulated concrete, reflective geometry form – the architecture’s equivalent of William Blake’s ‘fearful symmetry.’

The building, in its simple and archaic way, does what it says on the can: massive, inverted, fluted panels of pale concrete rise to 33m height at the stadium’s centre, and run across the east and west sides of the building. These are blank, save for the large, lower arcades, lined with fat columns whose entasis denotes the enormous structural loads of walls and steel roof structure that they carry to ground. At each side of the south end, wide staircases draw fans to a large, sunny 3000m² outdoor gathering space above the car park, with the huge, raked seating area on the rink’s south side reached via a wide access deck of bars, food outlets and toilets.

On the south and north sides this sharp fluting morphs, for reasons unstated, into something more, softening to wide corrugations running across the surface from ground level upwards past the terraces, whose gravitational ‘hang’ is disturbed only the big circular glazed openings inserted into either admin or rental office spaces. Set in orderly fashion, the modifications these impose on the ‘drape’ of the facade make for curious viewing. I’m no expert on fluid dynamics, but if the thinking here is to emulate the flow state of a curtain, the effect seems overwrought, as if to suggest a logic that’s been pushed too far. Perhaps it’s not that at all – perhaps it’s the pervasive flatness and I’d be more convinced if the windows were set deep into the facade, but to me it feels unresolved.

Why circles anyway? Theo Hotz across the way riddled his facades with them like Swiss cheese – but surely that’s not the reason? ‘It’s based on the shape of an ice hockey puck,’ says Schneider dryly; and like the twist at the end of a movie, once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. The puck is the plot, and it’s everywhere; not just as exterior windows but those peeping into the stadium from the club’s offices, or the rooflights that puncture the corporate smoking rooms. In the shape of the stairs that lead you down to the 1200 cover dining space on the north side, all across the ceiling of that hospitality area where they’ve even got real pucks as table markers. And, at 76mm diameter, they gather in thousands to help form the cladding panels running along the arcade at ground and up the terrace access stairs, like a form of sportive rustication. Perhaps there’s something to be said for relentless logic after all.

For a firm noted for obsessive detailing, CSTJ’s subtle touches can be hard to see internally. Not in the service stairs or the 14 corporate boxes (where that belonging to the club president would appeal to the late Kirstie Alley of Cheers fame); nor in the strange, anonymous corridor that links them all.

So against this ‘rough simplicity’ it’s as if the practice has had to think spatially of moves at grand scale. The main rink’s huge hall, spanning shorter 90m sides with massive, 6m deep steel beams, is imposing for anyone looking south to the high, raked seating, or looking back over the stalls, hospitality and press suites of the north. And in the blank east and west walls, great, deep niches have been carved out of the concrete; a highly sculptural, reductive act that’s welcome – otherwise there’s 100,000 tonnes of the stuff. It’s an embodied energy quotient the firm hopes to offset via a services strategy of ice being created using electricity from a waste to power energy centre and the heat generated from freezing it used to condition the stadium, and other buildings nearby. Rooflit where the PV array doesn’t get in the way, some of the niches allow daylight to filter down over the concrete, creating that elusive link of black box to the outside world. ‘They are also rigged to light up or flash when either team scores,’ Schneider explains brightly, proving LED to be an effective substitute when you can’t bring your forms together in light.

I’ve enjoyed my visit reconciling Caruso St John conceptually with ice hockey, but Schneider doesn’t think that the practice will be wanting to do another one any time soon – even if, with up to 45 people in the Zürich office during its construction, it might have felt at one point like the tail wagging the dog. For now, the firm seems happier at its current 25, working on much, much smaller commissions while seeking the arts work that has so far eluded it. ‘You don’t get famous with a stadium,’ says Schneider, but it will need time to build the contacts. I ask him how CSTJ faces off against major league Herzog & de Meuron, big hitter Valerio Olgiati or rookie Christ & Gantenbein. ‘We are seen as an English office but, with Florian and I running it, in some ways Swiss as well. But we’re also outside the scene – Paradiesvogel – a bit exotic,’ he adds, with the country’s second largest ice hockey arena behind him. ‘For now, not as serious as the Swiss offices, but serious enough to get the work.’

 

IN NUMBERS

Construction cost SFr169m 
Area 70,000m² 
GIFA cost per m² SFr2414 
Seats 12,000 
Rooftop pv array 400kWp