Sustainability in the workplace

Aréna Business Campus in Budapest is the latest jewel in the crown of Atenor, a real estate development company that operates across nine European countries and has made sustainability and innovative urban planning the cornerstones of its business.
The complex is located in one of the most important business districts in the Hungarian capital, an urban area not far from the old city centre where a large bakery, the Budapest Bread Factory, stood at the beginning of the 20th century.
Extending over an area of 72,000 square metres, the Aréna Business Campus is first and foremost a best practice, a benchmark for excellence in terms of sustainability. In particular, the entire complex has been awarded international BREEAM Excellent certification for its use of environmentally-sustainable technologies and materials while creating invigorating workspaces that enhance users’ quality of living and working.
With its four large buildings, spacious interior garden and extensive pedestrian area, the complex has the pleasant and distinctive atmosphere of a university campus. It is still under construction with work scheduled to be completed by 2023. To date (early 2021) Building A has been completed and Building B is also close to handover.
The design project for this innovative workplace was awarded to Budapest-based Lukács és Vikár Architect Studio. The architectural concept focuses on the relationship between the buildings and the surrounding area and the desire to create a light, relaxing and even joyful look and feel. “Fitting in with the scale and character of the surrounding streets was an important consideration for us when we began working on the overall structure. Large ground-floor openings create easily accessible collective interior spaces, while high-quality cladding facilitates the dialogue with the green areas, which in turn communicate with the pedestrian precincts in the nearby streets. We gave variety to the facades by using multi-coloured, profiled and painted aluminium cladding.”
The interior design project was carried out by Barbara Krizsan Design Studio and consists of a clean, high-impact design culminating, almost as a kind of manifesto, in the lobby of building A. “In this first reception area, I wanted to adopt a clean concept with shapes that contrast with the geometry of the facades and the combination of colours, while using the reception desk to create a kind of prism effect,” says Barbara Krizsan. “I love rigorous lines and always follow the mantra of “less is more”, but along with purity I also like to create a memorable design, an atmosphere that is perceptible to visitors from the very first moment they look in from the street. I want to surprise them. Here I restricted the colour palette to grey, anthracite and gold and used contrasting surfaces to provide the perfect backdrop for the furnishing elements created by designer Fabio Novembre (whose work I love!) and other iconic Italian design products, such as Artemide’s Alphabet of light system. In this context, the Concreto collection from Lea Ceramiche, which I chose for both the floors and the walls, took on an important role, enhanced by the clean lines of the entire space.”
Chosen in the sizes 120×120 cm and 120×260 cm in the paler Concreto Light shade and the darker Concreto Dark tone, the collection creates a strikingly modern and linear contrast between the subtle luminosity of the floors and the elegant dark grey of the walls. Inspired by concrete, the quintessential material of modern architecture, these ceramic tiles have a highly textured, contemporary and sophisticated feel, making them ideal for the style of the Aréna Business Campus.