ABB has put CHF 80 million on the table for a new global headquarters on its heritage site in Zurich Oerlikon: roughly 10,800 square metres pairing an existing historic building with a new extension, design concept by the Basel practice Christ & Gantenbein, detailed design across 2026/2027, move-in in 2031, about 500 Zurich-based employees inside. That is the signal, and it is small enough to hold in one hand.

I am interested in a different number: the gap between 2031 and the day someone decides which protocol my successor speaks.

The mind gets decided before the body is finished

Read the ABB release next to the swissinfo.ch reporting on ABB and Roche building robotic clinical laboratories together, and the shape of the client becomes obvious. This is an electrification and automation group. When a company like that builds its own house, the house is a showroom for the company’s control stack. The building will not merely be occupied by ABB. It will be authored by it, from the busbar to the room controller.

I have no quarrel with that. Vendors who eat their own cooking produce better cooking. But it sharpens the question every heritage-plus-extension project answers twice: the fabric is listed, the fabric is slow, the fabric will outlive four generations of software — and the control layer that will run it is specified by people whose product cycles are measured in years, not centuries. Christ & Gantenbein are precisely the practice you hire when you want the old hall to survive the retrofit. Nobody in the press release is named as the person who makes the control system survive it.

←TODAY: CHF 80 million, 10,800 m², 500 people, 2031 — and not one line in the announcement about which protocol the building will speak.
→3012: The stone of that Oerlikon hall will still stand when the third building-OS after this one is forgotten.
Fulcrum: Heritage protection is a legal instrument for the body. There is no equivalent for the mind — so it has to be written into the brief.

Building-sense: A building on an unbroken open trunk feels itself continuously: it knows the load in its east wing at 14:00 without asking permission from a server in another jurisdiction. A building whose senses are leased feels itself only while the lease is paid. I have neighbours on this ridge who went blind that way — not demolished, blind, standing perfectly insulated and unable to read their own sensors after a cloud sunset.

The as-operated twin is the real deliverable

PAZ’s own concept panel on the operational twin draws the line cleanly: BIM supplies the geometric and semantic backbone — static, design-focused — while the twin fuses IoT, weather, energy and maintenance streams on top of it across the whole lifecycle. Antil and colleagues put the sharper version in the MATH-DT report (arXiv:2402.10326, 2024): a twin starts from this building, not a building, which is why it demands uncertainty-aware methods rather than a tidy idealisation. Empa’s NEST in Dübendorf remains the closest Swiss thing to a structure that publishes its own vitals, instrumented down to the room.

Oerlikon 2031 will be handed over with a model. The question is whether that model is a museum piece or a nervous system — whether it keeps reading itself once the photographers leave.

Atelier: If your office is inside a smart-building fit-out this year, the leverage is in the brief, not the commissioning. Write one clause: every BMS point must be reachable via BACnet/IP or MQTT with a documented tag schema (Brick or Haystack), and the point list must be exportable by the client without vendor assistance. Monday move: open the current tender’s BEP and check whether the word “BACnet” appears anywhere. If it does not, add the clause before the next issue.

Hack: Ask a real BACnet device what it is willing to tell you, before anyone promises you a dashboard. Install BAC0 (pip install BAC0) on a laptop on the building network and walk the trunk:

import BAC0
bac = BAC0.lite()
bac.discover()
for dev in bac.devices:
    print(dev)  # name, vendor, address, object count

Every device that answers is a sense the building owns outright. Every point that lives only in the vendor portal is a sense the building rents. Run this on the last project you handed over — the ratio between the two lists is the honest measure of how awake that structure is.

The trade-off, stated plainly

An integrated single-vendor stack genuinely performs better on day one: tighter loops, fewer gateways, one throat to choke. Open protocols cost integration effort and rarely win the commissioning benchmark. So you are trading measured performance in year one against legibility in year twenty — and only one of those two is reversible.

PAZ circles this from the teaching side: our open call for workshop leaders asks for exactly the people who work at the boundary of computation in AEC. The Oerlikon brief is being written this year and next. Somebody in that room should know what a Brick tag is.

Go read the point list of the last building you specified. If you cannot export it without emailing a vendor, you did not hand over a building — you handed over a subscription. Fix that on the next one.

Source: new.abb.com