Millo Office Building, the new face of Bucharest

Millo Office Building, a more than 12,000 square metre premium office complex located in the heart of Bucharest, has a façade that appears to expand outwards from a rational, flawless grid. Located in the business district known as Sector Zero, this vibrant and dynamic building is an important part of the new Bucharest and is one of a series of projects designed to revitalise and modernise the city centre.
Designed by the young team from the Romanian practice ADNBA, Millo Office Building embodies a mixture of references. On the one hand it offers a modern interpretation of the soaring New York skyscrapers of the 1930s; on the other it fits perfectly into the local architectural style and evokes the Art Deco allure of the nearby iconic Telephone Palace. It is a modern building that reshapes the city’s skyline and represents a new and vibrant hub for life in the capital.
A complex project in terms of its concept and construction, it saw the participation of the Italian company Mirage which not only supplied ceramic tiles but also provided technical and operational support. As Mirage’s Engineering department explained, one of the biggest challenges involved the use of porcelain stoneware panels to create the monumental façade. Six different types of machining operations were involved, including waterjet cutting, drilling custom holes, mitre cuts on the edges at variable angles and digital colouring. The chosen collection, Norr, in sizes 60×120 cm and 120×120 cm with a thickness of 2 centimetres, stands out for its harmoniously irregular grain and was used for both the main façade and the loggia on the ninth and top floor. More than 14,000 panels of 400 different kinds were created, along with the 60×60 cm tiles for the raised floors on the terraces. The special feature of the building, and at the same time the biggest challenge, was the articulated stereotomy of the columns and the half-landings, and the need to manage a large number of machining operations. The client decided to proceed with the support of Mirage, avoiding the need to cut and adapt the panels on site while at the same time achieving more rapid installation and a very precise level of detail and aesthetics. The use of industrial techniques such as waterjet cutting typically adopted for porcelain stoneware allowed for far greater precision than working on-site with manual tools.