New headquarters for MOL Group is completed by Foster + Partners
12/12/2022.
[Budapest] Hungary
metalocus, ANDRÉS BLANCO
metalocus, ANDRÉS BLANCO
MOL Group Headquarters by Foster + Partners. Photograph by Nigel Young / Foster + Partners.
Project description by Foster + Partners
MOL Headquarters is the new headquarters for the MOL Group, a global oil and gas company based in Hungary. The new building consolidates the company’s operations in one place while creating an exciting new addition to the city’s skyline.
An integral part of the MOL Group’s sustainable vision for 2030, the building provides a blueprint for the office of the future. Its unique form integrates a 28-storey tower with a podium a single form to create a unified campus. The lower floors house restaurants, a gym, a conference centre and a whole host of other facilities for staff, while the flexible office spaces are on the upper levels.
Greenery travels through the heart of the building, from the central atrium to the rooftop, bringing nature closer to the workspace. It also acts as a social catalyst, creating spaces for collaboration, relaxation and inspiration. The offset service cores create large flexible areas that encourage collaborative patterns of working. Using cutting-edge technology to control light levels, temperature and views these workspaces are finely calibrated to create the perfect working environment, a light-filled inspirational space for people to work in.
Setting a new benchmark both for Budapest and Hungary, the design of the building makes the most of its urban context to drive a sustainable response. The MOL Headquarters seeks to preserve live-work relationships as part of the urban experience, where people are able to walk or cycle to work. All occupants have a direct connection to the external environment providing fresh air, daylight and views. The building utilises low and zero-carbon energy sources, such as photovoltaics, and features rainwater harvesting and storage facilities.
Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.
Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of a high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.
Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.
METALOCUS > 05.2017