Raiffeisen’s flagship branch on Zurich’s Kreuzplatz dissolves traditional barriers between customer and employee, creating a new type of “open bank,” a space of encounter. Advanced technologies make banking infrastructure largely invisible; employees access terminals concealed in furniture elements, while a robotic retrieval system grants 24 hour access to safety deposit boxes.
This shifts the bank’s role into becoming a light-filled, inviting environment – an open lounge where customers can learn about new products and services. This lounge feels more like a high-end retail environment than a traditional bank interior. Conversations can start spontaneously around a touchscreen equipped info-table and transition to meeting rooms for more private discussions. The info-table not only displays figures from world markets in realtime, but can be used to interactively discover the history of Hottingen, or just check the latest sports scores.
Elegantly flowing walls blend the different areas of the bank into one smooth continuum, spanning from the customer reception at the front, to employee workstations oriented to the courtyard. The plan carefully controls views to create different grades of privacy and to maximize daylight throughout. The walls themselves act as a membrane mediating between the open public spaces and intimately scaled conference rooms. Portraits of the quarter’s most prominent past residents like Böklin, Semper or Sypri grace the walls, their abstracted images milled into Hi-macs using advanced digital production techniques. While intricately decorative, the design ground the bank in the area’s cultural past, while looking clearly towards the future.
