Corvin 5 office building, Budapest, Hungary

An impressive office building with a dynamic floorplan catches the eye in Budapest’s Corvin quarter. A special exposed concrete design ensures harmony both inside and out.

The Corvin quarter is one of the largest city planning developments in Budapest’s history. New constructions have replaced old, dilapidated buildings with new commercial, residential and office buildings. 

The Corvin 5 office building is an important anchor in the quarter, forming the end point of a promenade. The architects at 3H designed a building with a dynamic floorplan similar to a prism. The team designed a building with cantilevers and structures encapsulated by one another. The building is intended to evoke a feeling of flowing transition – so the architects selected a textured façade with a wave structure to reinforce this impression. 

The pattern 2/94 Orinoco was chosen – one of over 250 designs in RECKLI’s SELECT series. Orinoco was used to apply an even wave structure to the concrete, with elevations sticking up by 35mm. With this texture, the façade plays host to an aesthetic interplay of light and shadow as the sunlight wanders over it throughout the day. Light sources create a similar effect inside, so the architects employed Orinoco for the internal architectural concrete too. One formliner at 1,220mm x 5,000mm and one measuring 1,220mm x 2,000mm were used to create the harmonious design on 2,000 square meters of exposed concrete in total. The precast elements for the inside and outside were made in the Argomex precast plant. Corvin 5 was finished in 2019 and was nominated to the Office of the Year Award shortlist.