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Quadrum Business Centre
When completed, in the next few years, Norwegian property development company Schage Real Estate’s innovative Quadrum Business City will provide more 40,000 square metre of office and retail space in the rapidly growing Snipiskes business district of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. It will also include a 30,000 square-metre three-story underground parking garage, and the input of more than 50 different contractors, subcontractors and suppliers.
Architect Lund and Slaatto Arkitekter (Donal Cassidy) Location Vilnius - Lithuania Company involved Apliband (Grupo Andalucia) Website www.apliband.com -
ROC Carolus School
The first impression of the ROC Carolus building is deceptive, and deliberately so. Passers-by and visitors see a ‘crazy’ building, a fractured and playful facade, with irregularly polygonal windows breaking up the variety of shades of grey in the prepainted metal cladding that floats above a glazed ground floor. This cladding in turn has ‘fault lines’ along it, as if the whole could shatter in an instant. It takes a moment to realise that this is disguising the fact that the building in fact consists of relatively regular blocks joined by glazing. The overall assembly is largely rectilinear, but with one end curving to a point like the prow of a ship. Far from this being an example of unexplained exuberance, careful consideration has gone into making the facade, like the rest of the building, hard working and affordable.
Architect AGS Architekten & Planners Location Nijmegen - The Netherlands Company involved Euramax Coated Products Website http://www.euramax.nl -
AV College
Look at one side of the AV College Helsinki and you appear to be studying a pixellated image of ... well, you can’t tell what, and that is a deliberate strategy on the part of the architects. Ark-House Architects, also based in Helsinki, used six different off-the-shelf colours of prepainted metal to create an almost entirely windowless facade that makes reference to the digital techniques that are happening inside this college, dedicated to audiovisual education. The practice’s Pentti Kareoja says that they considered putting in a definite image, such as a face, but decided to leave it abstract – a wise decision. ‘Now people can find their own images,’ said Kareoja.
Architect Ark-House Architects (Pentti Kareoja) Location Helsinki - Finland Company involved Rautaruukki Website http://www.ruukki.com