Staccato office building
Winner of an architectural competition, the STACCATO office building is built in a predefined building window and elegantly stands on five floors at the corner of Rue Erasmus and Boulevard Konrad Adenauer in Luxembourg-Kirchberg. he filigree outer shell is composed of fine beige concrete stelae. This arrhythmic lacework stands out visually from the structural and thermal envelope and gives the building a light and homogeneous appearance. On the pedestal, at the corner of the two streets, the concrete stelae rise over two floors for a more slender appearance, in front of the mezzanine and the first of the four office floors. The public reception area is located at this luminous mezzanine, four metres below the ground floor, which forms a transparent link between Erasmus Street and its garden planted with grasses, perennials, conifers and shrubs. A sculptural staircase in the form of a fluid helicoidal staircase, in a dark and soft shade reminiscent of brown, with steps in light terrazzo, and illuminated by a circular dome in its vertical line, leads to the upper floors. In order to accommodate up to nine tenants, the floors rest solely on a central core, thus creating a large open space, painted in light grey, completely free of posts and illuminated all around by a continuous row of windows. The structure of the internal envelope is organised on a four-metre grid, while the glass façade is organised on a one-metre grid. This means that the panels can be divided into office modules of any size, from individual offices to open-plan offices. This structural open-plan design, coupled with the regularity of the openings in the facade and the technical subfloor, allows maximum flexibility in terms of internal layout. Large, single-storey windows, two on each level, allow the occupants to step forward flush with the façade. This architectural gesture encourages tenants to plan their interior layout in accordance with their space, in direct connection with the public domain. The common vertical circulations on all floors – the large heli- codal staircase, two elevators and the emergency staircase – form the central core, which serves as a bracing for the building. The two elevators are leaning with their glass face against a common void, where steles, reminiscent of the façade, form a sculptural landscape, which makes an innocuous act an adventure.The building stands on two basements, one for the car park with a ramp shared with the neighbouring building and one floor for the archives and technology.
BREEAM certified and class B, the building is equipped with activated concrete slabs – cooled and heated by a system of geothermal wells. It is energy self-sufficient.
