Sunstar Headquarter Etoy | Giancarlo Alhadeff

The design for the new Sunstar Headquarters (S-SAR SA; Sunstar SUISSE) is located in Etoy along the Route de Pallatex, in the Canton of Vaud.
The area is located about 850 meters to the north of Lake Geneva and just south of Autoroute Suisse A1.
The building is designed to satisfy Sunstar’s needs to establish a headquarters in Etoy that could hold their administrative offices and that could be representative of the company’s philosophy. The design aims to create a building that has characteristics of high environmental quality and energy conservation. The environmental quality will also be ensured by the selection of materials with certified characteristics and the energy objectives will also be achieved through the standards required by the Minergie certification.
The new building, comprising 4 floors and a basement, has a skylit courtyard and is aligned on the site with the adjacent buildings towards the highway.
The arrangement, the orientation and the use of the chosen materials achieves the goal of a low environmental impact and an internal and external fit into the landscape.
The analysis of the climatic and environmental context has advised us to identify the shape of the building with a strong visual permeability so that moving towards and within it we will create the least visual impact, defined by the constant variation of scenarios created by the environment and the architecture of the building.
The building will be constructed with a mixed structure (concrete structural columns and bearing walls for the stair and elevator enclosures). The vertical opaque external walls will be in laminated wood, with exterior insulation, air curtain, and external ventilated facade in Fiber C or alternatively in stone. All external walls will be thermally insulated.
The horizontal slabs will be in concrete and will support a raised access floor (30 cm in height). This void will be used as a plenum for air distribution and the distribution of the electrical and sprinkler systems.
The interior partitions of the service blocks, of the toilets and the plant rooms will be built in Gasbeton blocks and/or in slabs of calcium silicate or in insulated panels made of fiber gypsum. The interior walls separating the rooms will be made of movable partitions, opaque if perpendicular to the facade and transparent if parallel to the facade.

The interior floors for all general office functions will be carpeted; they will be in wood for the conference room and in stone for the hall and stairs.
The walls of wet areas will be tiled.

The energy concept of the project focuses on the use of natural ventilation, an internal thermal mass and external thermal insulation. Since large part of the energy consumption in an office building is electrical (air conditioning and lighting) we optimized the use of natural light and of renewable re-sources available whenever possible.
Aspects of the production and distribution of energy are summarized in the following section.
In order to control solar energy during the summer we have used low emis-sive glazing to control heat transfer, at times screen printed, and external moveable sunshades. The verification of the Sia 382/1 for the solar factor g is detailed in the enclosed document AR.PD.12.
The integration of solar thermal and photovoltaic panels and energy produc-tion systems are a significant element in the energy concept.
The building plan and the fragmentation of the outer surface reduces expo-sure to external radiation.
The office space is distributed on three floors around the central atrium; the atrium also provides natural ventilation, recovery of the exhaust air, as well as natural light transmission.
Every work environment is less than 7 meters from the perimeter and the furthest workstation has a minimum FLD (daylight factor) of 2%.
The project envisages that the availability of natural resources (solar radia-tion, green, …) intended as resources, are to be exploited to improve energy efficiency and to obtain the comfort of indoor and outdoor areas. This will also be done by controlling the thermal mass, the ventilation and the dy-namics of available solar radiation as a function of the activities contained.