Olivia Business Centre, Gdansk, Poland
The super modern Olivia Business Centre in Gdansk is a symbol of this up-and-coming region’s business ambitions. Custom details form an homage to local culture.
Set in the Polish harbor city of Gdansk, the Olivia Business Centre boasts 150,000 square meters of usable space, making it the largest commercial complex in northern Poland. Large companies such as Allianz, ThyssenKrupp and Amazon and Polish businesses have set up right by the University of Gdansk.
The complex has been expanding by one building a year since 2010: Olivia Gate, Olivia Point, Olivia Tower, Olivia Four, Olivia Six, Olivia Prim A and Olivia Star have all joined the cluster since then - the highest building is dressed in a reflective glass façade. Work on Olivia Eight has been ongoing since 2018.
As the name suggests, Olivia Star is the star among the existing buildings: built in 2017, the building is 35 floors high. Olivia Star also features an underground parking garage. The Polish firm BJK Architects is responsible for the design. While the architects opted for a glass façade, they worked with exposed concrete for the parking garage interior. At the investor’s request, the architecture is a nod to the local area: Gdansk is a kind of gateway to Kashubia, an area that stretches inland from the Gulf of Gdansk in a southwesterly direction. A floral pattern typical of the region decorates the supporting columns in the parking garage. RECKLI produced a formliner from the UNIQUE series for this custom design.
“We used one formliner for the Kashubian columns, there were several dozen columns in the garage area,” says Jan Ryżkowski, Production Manager at the Pekabex precast plant in Gdansk. Pekabex has been using RECKLI at its plants for years now. The Gdansk plant has been using RECKLI formliners regularly since 2016, and appreciates the benefits on offer. “They have advantages for elements that are to perform an architectural function and are not to be built-in. They look amazing and we are not able to achieve such effects without using formliners,” says Ryżkowski. The columns in the parking garage were poured using high-performance C70/85 concrete, and the elastic textured formliner pressed fine lines and playful flowers into the concrete in great detail.
The effects of the RECKLI Tirari design can be seen in a neighboring building in the complex, the Olivia Patio conservatory. Tirari is a wooden texture from RECKLI’s SELECT series, which encompasses more than 250 designs. To complement the theme of the conservatory’s motif, the architects wanted to give the internal columns a natural tree trunk look. The architects ordered 42 columns from Pekabex. The precast plant only needed two formliners with the raw wood design to produce all columns.
Ryżkowski and his team used class 50/60 concrete for the wood-effect pillars. “We had to develop a recipe for white concrete, and worked intensively on the shape of the columns as they had to be oval,” he says. All that work paid off: the pillars look natural and create an exciting contrast to the surrounding glass.
Gdansk Harbor is a hub with marine links throughout Europe and Asia and is an important driver of the local economy. The Olivia Business Centre is the new home for businesses that have recognized and seek to promote the region’s economic potential.