The plot is located in the suburban residential area of the 3rd district of Budapest on Mátyáshegy. This quiet area was originally an orchard garden zone and later became a garden city area. This zone is now located between the Budapest’s dense urban fabric and the outer green zone -on the border of city and nature. The GeoConcept Ltd. is a building engineering company comitted to the protection of environment. The owner wanted to build a two-storey, geothermal heated, natural daylight lighted, zero noise emission office building with extremely low energy consumption in this suburban environment for the company.

Our ambition was to create a compact and full efficient office building prototype, to create a transitional space that cooperates maximally with the nature around it through large glass surfaces. For us, it was a contemporary architectural challange to create a new relationship between interior and exterior, between light and shade in this surrounding urban context and scale. Inside the building we minimalised the structural elements and created a flexible open-air office space around the building core. We designed a cantileverd prefabricated galvanized steel grid shading systeme around the building, in front of the curtain walls. The steel grid facade acts as a shading solution, on the other hand, as a large zinc screen, it reflects the surrounding vegetation. The slender steel frame supports walls of varying opacity.