Pratteln motorway service station

Pratteln motorway bridge from the east

The Pratteln motorway service station is located on the A2 / A3 a few kilometers east of Basel in the Pratteln municipality . The yellowish-orange service area , also known as the gateway to Switzerland , is passed by an average of 115,000 vehicles every day; around 3 million vehicles make a stopover every year.

The structural dominant feature of the rest stop is a 100 m long bridge over the six-lane motorway at this point, which houses two restaurants in the base buildings and a row of shops in the transition. The building offers 15 shops a sales area of 1850 m² and has belonged to the Italian catering and trading company Autogrill since the renovation . Before that, the service station was known as the Windrose motorway service station . Their architectural design through the soft-edge aesthetics is considered typical of the 1970s.

architecture

Facade detail

The bridge was designed by the Basel architects Casoni & Casoni and handed over to its destination on October 26, 1978. The oil crisis in 1973/74 delayed construction, which had already been approved by the Basel government six years before it opened. The bridge over the motorway can be reached on both sides via two base structures from the respective parking lots. The central porthole on both sides is a striking element of the bridge . The parts of the building that are on the side of the service area have nine smaller portholes on each side. The total of 56 portholes are encased in the facade cladding, which protrudes outward due to their arched shape. The central part above the motorway is divided into two areas by a curved line. The 98 wall and eight corner elements are made of plastic; the wall thicknesses are between 6 and 8 mm. The originally orange-brown lacquered facade is made of fiberglass- reinforced polyester resin , which was processed using the hand lay-up method, and is painted in a striking yellow-orange. This painting by the artist Jorge Pardo replaced the original design in orange and brown during the renovation in 2000. The process of recoating polyester elements was also used on life-size polyester cows in the Mystery Park Interlaken.

literature

Pratteln motorway service station . In: Building in steel . No. 11 , 1979, pp. 64-68 .
Ulrike Kunkel: … getting on in years. Facade cladding of the Pratteln motorway service station (CH), 1978 . In: Deutsche Bauzeitung . No. 4 , April 3, 2006, ISSN 0721-1902 , p. 60–65 ( db-bauzeitung.de ).
Roland Th. Jundt: The plastic facade of the Pratteln motorway service station . In: Plastics in Construction . No. 3 , 1979, pp. 110-112 .
Max Müller: Façade renovation of a special kind. Motorway service station “Passenger” in Pratteln . In: applica . tape 107 , no. 17 , 2000, ISSN 1422-4194 , p. 15-18 .