Zurich North America Headquarters

Zurich North America needed a single building to replace a scattered facility and hold nearly 3,000 people, on 40 acres of expressway frontage in Schaumburg that had once been part of the Motorola campus. The brief asked for strength and stability, the company’s own words for itself, made architectural.

The answer was to stop laying buildings out across the site and stack them instead. Three glass bars, offset from one another, hold 783,800 square feet in a form that reads as one object from Interstate 90. The top bar rises 11 stories and cantilevers toward downtown Chicago. Certified LEED Platinum.

Client: Zurich North America
City: Schaumburg, Illinois
Size: 11 stories; 783,800 sq ft total 72,820 sq m total; 40 acres / 16.2 hectares

Features

Fitness center

Cafeteria

Conference center

Outdoor terraces

Walking trails

2,350 parking spaces

LEED Platinum

Developer: CRG

Recognition

2020 Gold Award, Commercial Building – Pro+ Awards

2018 Green Good Design Award – The Chicago Athenaeum

2017 International Architecture Award – The Chicago Athenaeum

2017 Honorable Mention, Office & Retail – The Architect’s Newspaper

2017 Best Project, Green Projects – ENR Midwest Magazine

2017 Build to Suit Project of the Year – Chicago Commercial Real Estate Awards

2017 National Award of Merit, Office Buildings – Design-Build Institute of America

2017 Building Team Silver Award – Building Design & Construction Magazine

2017 Finalist, Excellence in Design (Architecture) – Design-Build Institute of America

2017 Finalist, Merit Award for New Construction Suburbs – Chicago Building Congress

2016 Award of Merit – Structural Engineers Association of Illinois

2014 Office Development of the Year – NAIOP Chicago Chapter

Exterior

A 40-acre site invites sprawl, and the conventional answer for a suburban headquarters is a low, wide plan with a center core and parking around it. That plan gives every floor the same depth, the same orientation and the same view. It was rejected here in favor of a form that had to work harder and gives back more.

The complex from the approach road, the three bars reading as horizontal layers behind autumn trees.

The three bars are offset in section, each one engaging a different part of the site and a different orientation. Amenities take the south and west exposures and office plates the east and north, which lowers mechanical load across the complex before a single system is sized. The arrangement also opens views of the surrounding landscape and produces the kind of programmatic flexibility a center-core building cannot. The uppermost bar carries the identity: 11 stories, cantilevered toward downtown Chicago, warm wood on its soffit, legible from the interstate at 70 miles an hour.

The full silhouette of the three bars mirrored in a retention basin at dusk, native prairie grasses in the foreground.

Horizontal aluminum sunshades clad the perimeter of all three bars, varying in depth according to what each facade faces. Behind them the glass runs floor to ceiling, and the office plates are shallow enough that daylight reaches across them. The building’s environmental performance is not concealed behind its surface; it is the surface.

The cantilever is the part that costs something. Projecting 11 stories of occupied floor plate toward the city takes diagonal bracing, and that bracing is not hidden. It crosses the glass on the office floors as a white truss, so the people working behind it can see what holds the building out over the site.

From the green roof of a lower bar, looking along the warm wood soffit of the cantilever overhead with a walking trail and railing at the edge.

An office floor at the perimeter, workstations along the glass with the white diagonal bracing crossing it and the pond and prairie beyond.

The form of the building is clear, even at high speeds.
Matthew Messner, The Architect’s Newspaper

The full massing in daylight from the southwest, the cantilever and the horizontal sunshade grid above newly planted prairie.

The space between the bars is as considered as the bars themselves. Multi-level plazas step down through terraced planting, sheltered from the wind by the volumes on either side but open to the sky, with the three-story double wall glazing one edge of them. Outdoor seating and direct sightlines into the dining and social spaces give the ground plane something closer to the feel of a quad than a corporate forecourt. Where the middle bar steps back, the double wall moderates the transition between a Chicago winter and a Chicago summer, and green roofs on the lower bars hold stormwater and insulate the floors underneath.

The courtyard between the bars, the cantilever overhead and terraced planting beds running through the plaza with people walking.

The plaza at grade, people seated on wood benches among planting with the glass facade and cantilever above.

The main entry sits under a projecting canopy in the same language as the rest: steel, glass, and the warm wood that appears wherever the bars meet. Reception is visible from the forecourt. Walking trails run out from the building into restored native prairie, and the retention basins that manage stormwater double as the thing the building looks at.

The main entry canopy at dusk, Zurich signage on the bar above and reception lit behind full-height glass.

Interior

The lobby reads as an extension of the campus rather than a separation from it. It is two stories, glazed on the perimeter, with the landscape in view from anywhere in the room. Terrazzo underfoot, a linear ceiling system overhead, and a restrained gray and white palette carry the exterior’s precision indoors without repeating it.

The two-story lobby, terrazzo floor and linear ceiling system, glazed on the perimeter with the landscape in view and people seated.

The dining hall runs the length of a full-height glass wall facing the plaza, so lunch happens with the courtyard in view and, in warm months, spilling into it. The open stair rises through the same volume, and the collaboration seating scattered along it is deliberate: circulation was treated as program, not as leftover.

The dining hall along a full-height glass wall, tables occupied and the plaza and landscape visible outside.

The open stair rising through the glazed volume, with collaboration seating in the foreground.

That decision came from the brief. Zurich’s previous facility separated its people; the new one was asked to put them in each other’s path. Interior design and workplace strategy were carried by CannonDesign, working to the same logic the massing set up, which is why the amenity floors and the collaboration spaces sit where the sun does.

A covered walk at grade, a warm wood ceiling running its length with glass to the landscape on one side and stone on the other.

Underneath all of it, LEED Platinum. Restored prairie and on-site retention across the 40 acres, green roofs on the lower bars, sunshades tuned per facade, a double wall doing seasonal work, and shallow daylit plates that ask less of the lights. None of that was added to the building. It is what the shape is for.