“Excellence” in ground-breaking

Gregor Lüthi, foreman, Adelino Castro Fernandes, storeman, and trainee Simone Procopio are working on the Green Datacenter project in Dielsdorf and were asked to prepare the ground-breaking ceremony. They put a huge amount of work into it. Alongside the stage they built themselves and the lectern, their real masterpiece was the gifts for the client, made in house and decorated with a stone from the excavation work. We were so impressed that we wanted to know more, so we talked to Gregor Lüthi.

Gregor, where did you get the idea to make a present for the client from the excavated material and concrete?

The idea to stage a ground breaking ceremony and prepare gifts for the client came from my boss Markus Meier, and we thought about how to put it into practice. By coincidence, we still had a template for formwork with a milled Implenia logo on the construction site, and I thought that would definitely look cool and stylish in combination with the wooden plugs. We had the plates with the metal writing produced externally – and the client gift was ready!

The client gift, designed and produced by the construction site team

How did you make the other parts for the ceremony (stage, lectern etc.)?

Markus and Thomas asked us to provide a wooden podium and a lectern – I thought it was a great opportunity for our trainee Simone Procopio to show what he can do. I asked him to do it – and he did a great job, didn’t he?!

Wooden podium and lectern: the work of Simone Procopio, third-year trainee (bricklaying apprenticeship)

The entire ceremony, with the shovels, the branding and the whole set-up, was brilliantly prepared. Who organised that?

The idea of embedding a time capsule in concrete came from Thomas. I set up the staging, the whole ambience and the task that the concrete had to be mixed on site. I wanted to see how the people from the office would manage to mix their own concrete for the time capsule (laughs).

What inspired you to produce this extraordinary work?

If you are planning and holding an event like this anyway, I always think it is cool if you can later look back on a really great, successful day and know that you did a good job and everyone was pleased!

Any comments? Write to Gregor Lüthi

The Green Datacenter project, Dielsdorf, Switzerland

On a currently undeveloped area of 46,000 square meters in Dielsdorf, Implenia is building a campus with three large data centres, office buildings, commercial spaces and green zones for Aargau-based company Green Datacenter AG. Representatives of all the partners involved in the project, as well as a few guests, celebrated the start of construction on the new data centre with a ground-breaking ceremony on 1 October 2021. Not only will the project provide numerous jobs and apprenticeships in a range of professions for the local community over the next few years, it will also create a key Swiss location for the forward-looking IT sector, as well as a leisure space close to the station.

The company is investing around half a million francs in the large-scale project “Metro-Campus Zürich”, with the first of three data centres planned for completion in the third quarter of 2022. Construction is to take place in stages; work on an office building will also start shortly after construction begins on the first data centre. Office buildings and green space are planned on the side closest to the town, while the data centres will be on the industrial side. A footpath will provide car-free access to the station. Key criteria for the project were high-quality design for the environment and giving the community a new, attractive and direct route between the station and the shopping centre.

Implenia is implementing the project as general contractor, making a vital contribution to the creation of this campus. The scope of work includes not only all civil engineering, special civil engineering and complex master builder work, but also the entire building envelope including flat roof work and all steel construction. Inside the buildings, Implenia is providing the partitions made from sand-lime bricks and reinforced plaster walls, as well as painting, floor coatings and goods lifts.