Rondo 1 starts stacking up plaudits
"I am certain we will manage," says Piotr Turchoński from Hochtief Project Development Polska, the company behind Rondo 1.
The developer is talking up the building as Warsaw's first skyscraper on the world's scale. "Maybe in Chicago we can find two similar buildings," says Czez Komorowski from Epstein, the international design and construction management firm, which is part of the Rondo 1 team.
The building has already been labelled as one of the "great constructions of the Republic of Poland" by monthly magazine Architektura Murator and recently architects from all over Poland were on site for a guided tour.
Komorowski stressed that what makes the building so unusual is that the lift structure will be separated from the main buildings. Inside one of the 18 three-meter high elevators, passengers will be able to see the mechanism driving the machine. "This is a feeling of finding oneself in the interior of the machinery," boasts Komorowski. However, whether or not being in the innards of a machine as it hurtles skywards at five meters per second appeals to the average office worker remains to be seen. The lifts, which are provided by Otis on the basis of one of the biggest lift contracts in Poland, will reach the last floor at a height of 160 meters in just a minute.
Other high-tech novelties include the building management system, which allows users to change the temperature or lighting via computers. The 37th and 38th floors will house a data center where all the tenants' servers will be located. The project architects stress that the high-tech approach was applied from the early design stages, when all drawings were only communicated electronically. "Not a single sketch was on paper," says Krzysztof Ozimek from AZO, a Polish architectural studio.
The building is on a plot of land that was only created during Warsaw's post-war reconstruction. The street pattern of al. Jana Pawła and ul. Świętokrzyska did not exist before the war. This was a decisive argument that the architects had, namely whether Rondo 1 should face the ONZ roundabout or rather emphasis the street's pattern. Finally, as Ozimek said, they agreed on the latter.
The 40-storey Rondo 1 will be the third-highest building among the 37 skyscrapers in Warsaw, just after the Palace of Culture and Science and the Warsaw Trade Tower. According to the constructors' calculations, at strong winds it will lean by up to 30 centimeters. A 50-person team from Hochtief Project Development Polska is managing the 800 workers who put the glass and concrete together. Building sites are dangerous places, however, and so far there has been one casualty on the Rondo 1 construction site.
The developer is talking up the building as Warsaw's first skyscraper on the world's scale. "Maybe in Chicago we can find two similar buildings," says Czez Komorowski from Epstein, the international design and construction management firm, which is part of the Rondo 1 team.
The building has already been labelled as one of the "great constructions of the Republic of Poland" by monthly magazine Architektura Murator and recently architects from all over Poland were on site for a guided tour.
Komorowski stressed that what makes the building so unusual is that the lift structure will be separated from the main buildings. Inside one of the 18 three-meter high elevators, passengers will be able to see the mechanism driving the machine. "This is a feeling of finding oneself in the interior of the machinery," boasts Komorowski. However, whether or not being in the innards of a machine as it hurtles skywards at five meters per second appeals to the average office worker remains to be seen. The lifts, which are provided by Otis on the basis of one of the biggest lift contracts in Poland, will reach the last floor at a height of 160 meters in just a minute.
Other high-tech novelties include the building management system, which allows users to change the temperature or lighting via computers. The 37th and 38th floors will house a data center where all the tenants' servers will be located. The project architects stress that the high-tech approach was applied from the early design stages, when all drawings were only communicated electronically. "Not a single sketch was on paper," says Krzysztof Ozimek from AZO, a Polish architectural studio.
The building is on a plot of land that was only created during Warsaw's post-war reconstruction. The street pattern of al. Jana Pawła and ul. Świętokrzyska did not exist before the war. This was a decisive argument that the architects had, namely whether Rondo 1 should face the ONZ roundabout or rather emphasis the street's pattern. Finally, as Ozimek said, they agreed on the latter.
The 40-storey Rondo 1 will be the third-highest building among the 37 skyscrapers in Warsaw, just after the Palace of Culture and Science and the Warsaw Trade Tower. According to the constructors' calculations, at strong winds it will lean by up to 30 centimeters. A 50-person team from Hochtief Project Development Polska is managing the 800 workers who put the glass and concrete together. Building sites are dangerous places, however, and so far there has been one casualty on the Rondo 1 construction site.
