Topping-out ceremony for "THE CIRCLE" at Zurich Airport

Over 1000 invited guests from among the construction partners, including the team of KREBS+KIEFER Karlsruhe, could take a proud look at the impressive shell of the largest building construction project in Switzerland with an investment volume of around one billion Swiss francs at the "topping-out" on 5 March 2019.

The building complex with a gross floor area of around 180,000 m², built directly at Zurich/Kloten Airport according to plans by Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto, will in the future combine business, leisure, lifestyle, hotels, congresses, culture and medicine with excellent transport connections. The striking urban design is characterized by the building structure projecting far beyond the access ring road with its inclined façades. Especially for the latter, protective walls were erected during the construction period, the first of which was currently removed. The impressive façade, structured by precast concrete columns, could thus be experienced for the first time by visitors to the topping-out ceremony.

KREBS+KIEFER has been involved within the Gruner AG team in the structural planning of several construction phases and buildings since the preliminary project. The engineers from KREBS+KIEFER mastered the challenges in particular with the horizontal bracing of the inclined buildings, the filigree rows of columns on the façade levels thinning out downwards, and the highly complex spatial structure of the "Convention Hall". As a partner of Ribi+Blum AG and wlw Ingenieure, we have developed extremely special constructive solutions in the execution project, which made it possible to implement the transparent and flexibly designed shell.

Architect Riken Yamamoto and the representatives of Zurich Airport thanked all those involved for their great commitment during the execution of the project, which generated a daily construction output worth around one million Swiss francs.