GRAPHISOFT PARK BUILDING ‘M’

Over time each and every buildings’ appearance in Graphisoft Park truly reflect the altering needs of the client and the tenants considering office buildings. While the first buildings contained smaller office units in their layouts, with villa-scale masses, the houses created later on called for larger open office spaces and accordingly, for the appearance of larger masses as well. The tenant program of building ’M’ (Microsoft Hungary and Servier) required the construction of several thousand square meters of continuous office space incorporated in a simple prism, which was kind of an extreme end of the aforementioned notion. But at the same time the owner/client insisted on fitting into the park’s habitual mass-scale and structure. As a solution of this conflict we created an office space where the building receives enough light throughout the building mass despite its depth, and its apparent mass scale adapts to the scales appearing in the park. The other challenge was to place the labs of a global chemical company – Servier – in a building part, where the major mechanical service concealments were solved. (e.g.: extraction per laboratory) We achieved this by designing suitable roof extensions. The parking spaces arranged on three underground levels supply not only the buildings own parking needs, but the parking lots for the other buildings. During previous constructions no underground parking was created on ground because the lots above ground were thought to jeopardize the park’s character. The building consciously aims to categorize between industrial and office buildings, creating temporal continuity with the industrial building which once stood here. The doors and windows are pulled up to the inner plane of the bricks. They are divided by metal elements incorporating shades as well, placed on the outer plane and by glass in-lays which evoke the ochre and red colours of the environment.