Kuryłowicz & Associates

The total area of Focus Office Building is comparable to the area of Warsaw’s Old Town, and the number of its users equals the number of inhabitants of a small town. It was known from the beginning that it would be a building of unparalleled scale constituting the definite dominant feature not only in relation to the neighbouring buildings but also on the scale of the entire city. Owing to that fact, it was decided to give it a character of a separate organism functioning in line with the old urban objectives.

The rectangular-plan building has one strongly exposed entrance functioning as a city gate. The inner covered courtyard is an equivalent of a market - or a market place, around which the consecutive floor levels rise taken up on the ground and first floors by restaurants, shops, conference rooms, a sports club and communication centres and by offices on higher levels. The primary functional elements of the building – lifts, stairs, entrance lobbies and toilets – are located in the corners.

The building was divided into four independent parts-districts serviced by a three-storey underground car park. On the south side, at the sixth floor level, a four-storey winter garden – an equivalent of a city park, which serves as a recreational space for the users of the offices and also constitutes a visual link with the park on the south side of the street as well as with the panorama of the city centre on the north side, was located.

Being aware of the fact that the relationship of Focus Building with the environment will be strong due to its scale and huge volume, an assumption was adopted that the size of details and the materials used in shaping its façades should relate more to the scale of the city than to the building itself and its direct surroundings. The south elevation is made up of an “active” double-layer wall with a system of internal electrically controlled shutters. The west and east elevations, clad with polished granite in black colour, were emphasized by the steady rhythm of the massive stone blocks and window openings of enlarged overall dimensions that protrude outside their face. The two highest floors, covered with the zinc-titanium sheet cladding and emphasized with the bracketed cornice in the shape of an aircraft wing, constitute the finial of the composition of the building.

Due to the distances resulting from the size of the building, the classic principal of maintaining consistency between the character of the elevations and the way of their shaping was abandoned in the interiors. The character and dynamics of the internal spaces of the structure are also determined by the individual sculptural forms of selected functional elements such as stairs, lifts and escalators.