THE CIRCLE
“We looked at the number of restaurants that would be needed, what sort of ideas, the number of hotels – building up the complete area”
T
he first meeting between Zurich Airport authorities and Vinoo Mehera FCSI, owner and CEO of promaFox consultancy, about the massive development project took place before the ground had been turned, in fact, before they even had an architect. Mehera and his team were asked to help come up with ideas for F&B formats to place throughout the proposed development.
The size of 30 football fields, the new building was to house two hotels, a conference center, an arts zone, an outpatients clinic as well as offices and shops. “We were brought in to develop the food concept,”
says Mehera. “At that time, they had only a vague idea of what it was going to be. We looked at the number of restaurants that would be needed, what sort of ideas, the number of hotels – building up the complete area.” “The variety of the different restaurants is a crucial element for the success of the Circle," says Stefan Feldmann, head The Circle, Flughafen Zurich AG. A competition was held to find an architect to design the building and in 2010 it was announced that Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto had won. His winning design was a semi-circle backed by a hill. It was unusual in that the floors increase in size as you go up the building, making it appear to lean forward. This maximizes the floorspace for the footprint and Mehera reckons this was one of the reasons that Yamamoto’s design won as it made the enterprise more worthwhile economically. “It was an expensive project and in order to make the business case viable they had to do something special,” he says. The whole building, which for a long time was the
biggest building site in Switzerland, cost about 1.2bn Swiss francs. It is all LEED Platinum. “This was an imperative from early in the project,” says Mehera. Yamamoto took inspiration for his design from the winding lanes and alleys of Niederdorf, the old part of Zurich. There are lanes and alleys throughout the Circle.
This underlines the fact that promaFox was helping to design, in essence, a new neighborhood. “We planned the formats, how many and where they should be to create that ambiance of a little city neighborhood with cafes, restaurants, bars and a hotel” says Mehera. The development is unusual in that it was so mixed, such a thing had not been done before. Heathrow Airport in London and Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport are looking at Zurich with interest, as they consider creating similar developments. With the Circle they’ve built a whole new district, which is connected to the airport. It is very well connected. There’s lots of parking, train links are good and there are facilities for private planes. The hotel and conference center were an integral part of the plan from the start. “We discussed should a hotel be four star plus, should it be complemented with a three- star hotel, and although it wasn’t initially expected that both should be run by Hyatt, that is what happened in the end,” says Mehera. “In the beginning it was envisioned that one hotel would run the convention center, and there’d be one hotel on its own.” It ended up with both hotels and conference center
being run by Hyatt. One hotel being a Hyatt Regency, one being a Hyatt Place, with the large convention center in between. Delegates have a choice of hotel depending on their budget. “The first meeting we had with promaFox was early in the process. We were looking at the plans, deciding on the available spaces required and how to lay them out,” says Max Burkhalter, executive chef, Hyatt International. “The brief was to come up with a very efficient BOH for the Convention Center. From the receiving, storage, production and finishing kitchens and dish out pantries, stewarding etc. After the first available draft, I spent a day in the promaFox office and finalized all details.” In the convention center promaFox suggested that two lifts were installed instead of one. This would facilitate clearing and rearranging a room between events.
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