Highway Maintenance Depot, CH-Bern
The Werkhof Bern is located on Schermenweg in an area used almost exclusively for administrative and commercial purposes, which appears as a cluster of individual functional buildings surrounded by railroad tracks and highways. The design proposes an expansion that would consolidate the existing building volumes to create a more cohesive overall layout of the site.
Similar to the boundary of the site across from Papiermühlestrasse, a large, flat structure is positioned to frame the street space. It occupies the lot parallel to Schermenweg and divides the maintenance yard into a front and a rear section.
A vertical structure marks the western end of the maintenance yard and establishes a spatial connection to the existing tall buildings. A second, elongated structure runs parallel to Schermenweg, defining the boundary of the maintenance yard and providing a clear boundary at the eastern end of the site, where the topography slopes down toward and up from the highway access roads. The construction of the new maintenance yard and the harmonization of its scale with the existing architectural context bind the entire site together into a unified whole.
