BASEL, Switzerland

DANIEL L. VASELLA, the chief executive of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, was standing at the center of his imposing new corporate campus this fall, describing the lengths he went to in order to realize his architectural vision. “I made them move the border crossing,” he said pointing toward France. “It interfered with our plans. I put 100,000,000 Swiss francs on the table and said: ‘Move it over there. Tear down these silos and cranes.’ ”

Such grandiosity may bring to mind Louis XIV, whose own architectural creations, from Versailles to his summer residence at Marly, were expressions of seemingly unlimited personal power. But Mr. Vasella’s agenda could be considered even more sweeping. A fit, youthful-looking 56-year-old, he has made Novartis into one of the most innovative and ferociously aggressive drug makers in the world.

And the campus can be read as part of its carefully tailored image. In eight years Mr. Vasella is halfway through completing a plan to transform a dilapidated chemical complex into one of the most ambitious undertakings in a decade  one known for its architectural one-upmanship. He has built 10 research and office buildings and has plans to complete up to seven more. Mimicking a formula that has become the norm for big-money development in cities as disparate as Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi, he has hired an army of world-renowned architects  from Frank Gehry to Rafael Moneo to Alvaro Siza and the team of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa  to design the individual buildings.

The procession of architectural treasures is laid out like jewels in a display case. And Mr. Vasella has effectively placed it behind a velvet rope by severely restricting access to the campus. The site is sealed off from the city, and he has refused to allow outsiders to photograph it until now. “We can’t say that people cannot write about it,” Mr. Vasella said, “but we didn’t make it easy. The problem is that if you talk too much before you are able to show something, you create more resistance to it.”