Galvani Business Center 5

"Green" Administrative Building GBC 5
Galvani Business Center 5 is the latest completed block of the Bratislava commercial-administrative complex between Galvaniho Street and the D1 motorway, which includes shopping parks and centers, passages, showrooms, hotels, and rentable administrative complexes. GBC 5 is an administrative building that dynamically responds to light conditions and orientation to cardinal directions with its lively façade and changing tectonics of windows. Wide panoramic views of the Carpathian slopes and northern Bratislava, dense vertical sunbreaks on the southern side, and longitudinal eastern and western façades with changing geometries of perforations and irregular façade courtyards with greenery bring a refreshing change and authentic design to suburban generic urbanism. GBC 5 seeks to address all critical issues and new challenges of contemporary design through its architectural and construction-technical solutions. The necessity for change in architectural design and the issues surrounding the city and developed landscapes are now also prompted by the recent experience of the global pandemic crisis and the impending climate change.
The block form of the administrative complex in the shape of the letter C respects the building layout of the land, light-technical conditions, construction economics, and today's technological trends in office building solutions. The operational layouts of variable rentable spaces allow for the application of individualized solutions in operation, circulation, and office landscape design. The architecture of GBC 5 provides all its clients with the benefits of "green architecture" design with the concept of green terraces, loggias, and open spaces aimed at improving the working environment. The landscape of trees in front of the main entrance creates a bio-aesthetic for the entrance portal, vestibule, and atrium of the complex, where the ecology of the tree structure naturally shades the glazed façade of the interior landscape and creates an organic play of shadows from living nature in the technological world.
The architectural solution of GBC 5 is characterized by the diversity of typologies of indoor and outdoor spaces, the dynamic tectonics of architectural constructions, openings, surfaces, cladding, natural materials, and black-and-white color schemes. The system of various open loggias on all floors with greenery and fresh air is not only a defining element of the building's architecture but also a current trend in redefined architectural design of working environments under new conditions. The possibility of generating naturally ventilated relaxation spaces with greenery in close proximity to the desk becomes a new necessity in times of the pandemic crisis. The green grove in front of the building continues onto the green roof of the vestibule and the main terrace of the object, thus confirming the idea of the architectural concept of merging living nature with the administrative building. The terrace serves as an open park allowing employees immediate access to the exterior, thereby enabling the penetration of light and sun into the interior open space of the green atrium. The green terrace above the main entrance divides the administrative building into two symmetrical parts while also emphasizing the main entrance to both enclosed layout parts of the object.
GBC 5 is a multifunctional object and a complex operational organism where various types of rentable office layouts and circulation circuits intersect, served by intricate networks of technological support with applications of the latest office space trends. Differentiated needs of tenants and semi-public, public commercial, and service operations for dining, relaxation, breaks, and contact with nature raise the demands on the standards of the working space. Technologies of digitized standards, physical and hygienic properties of the building, traffic servicing, and public transport capacity, various applications, cars, bicycles, and electric scooters continually change the architectural parameters of design.
Ambiguous and complex circulation diagrams of architectural operation are also reflected in the hybridity of the architectural form of modernist monofunctional typologies. Significant architect of the city's transformation into a global socio-economic space Rem Koolhaas declares that the identity of the city, place, and street has already come to an end. The story of the city is now replaced by the concept of size. What is now referred to as a city is a servicing mega-structure of the information society, such as offices, shopping, automotive transport, and parking lots. In such a generic city, lacking traditional public spaces, parks, and greenery, there emerges a demand for an authentic design of a new urban microstructure simulating the missing public urban space.
Architects and authors of GBC 5 Šebo - Lichý possess ten principles of design in their architectural manifesto, such as challenging, engagement, conceptuality, radicalness, precision, urbanity, freshness, generativity, provocativeness, and authenticity. The eleventh and main point of the manifesto is the ambition to be green, which is documented by their approach to design in their previous projects with a green façade at the ITB headquarters on Mickiewiczová Street, in the family house "among the trees," or in the developers' project of the garden city of Čerešne. Not only is there inspiration from nature, but also active and responsible design integrating nature, its principles, and a healthy environment are prerequisites for the necessary new strategies for creating thoughtful urban public and private architectural spaces, both residential and commercial. GBC 5 is such architecture generated by revised means of modernity for a new culture of the environment of the 21st century.