HES-SO valais university campus

The new complex faces Rue de l’Industrie on one side and reconnects with the medieval city and the wider region through the railway lines on the other. In this way, the building takes up another key theme of the city: the large infrastructures aligned along the valley’s axis and their transverse crossings.

By allowing public space to pass through the building, we propose a school that is open to the city and its inhabitants. In contrast to the “ivory tower” institutions of the 19th century, we understand spaces dedicated to knowledge transmission as marketplaces of ideas — open, truly public spaces.

At the urban scale, the tower of the old silo becomes a symbolic emblem of the institutions housed in the complex. Its iconic presence is further accentuated by the horizontality of the new construction alongside the railway tracks. Although it is a single volume, its articulation reveals adaptations to the context and brings the scale closer to that of the human experience.

An interior street connects the arrival point of the railway footbridge with the entrance plaza at street level. Throughout the building’s entire length, circulation spaces maintain a constant visual relationship between inside and outside, offering interesting diagonal views across spaces of varying heights. The communal areas and public parts of the program are strategically placed along this interior street.

Numerous non-hierarchical entrances shape this large, permeable, and functional structure, ensuring that the three institutions (HES-SO, EPFL, Quartier d’Innovation) have access both from Rue de l’Industrie and from the city above via a direct upper-level connection.

In Sion, the topography has shaped a city interconnected across different levels. This condition has given rise to urban spaces carved into the built volumes. The project embraces this topographical condition as its driving idea. The arrival of the railway footbridge re-links these various levels and, through the building, connects the old city with the industrial plateau beyond the tracks.