Shop & Trade Office Building

The new building designed for Shop & Trade, a clothing import and distribution company, is located on Pireos St. Pireos is a very significant ancient road that connects the city of Athens with the port of Piraeus. During the industrial revolution, this area was crowded with warehouses of diverse types of fabrication. In the past decade, there has been an effort to revive this avenue through the construction of museums, the renovation of the old gas factory, and the emergence of several restaurants and coffee houses appearing everywhere. The structure sits in a plot of land of 5,000 sq. m.,and is approximately 10,000 sq. m. that includes primarily offices, showrooms, and a market on the ground floor. There is also a 9,000 sq. m. underground parking garage to facilitate the needs of the offices above. The building is the composition of two distinct volumes; a four-story-office-building and a one-story-commercial-space. The office block is in the shape of the Greek capital letter ?, turning its back to the adjacent warehouses and opening up to Pireos Avenue. The single-story-market becomes the base of a dense garden overlooked by the main office block and the main crowded avenue.

The spatial concept is different, because its momentum is revealed in a threedimensional void formation along a busy street instead of creating a front edge condition, thus offering to all the people working in the offices amazing views of the garden, privacy, while providing an outlook of the city. Slopes to the roof top of the lower volume connect the private part of the composition with the public street at a higher level.

The building structure is made of exposed concrete. Sustainability is a driving force in its design. A variety of methods were used as geothermal, an atrium in the center of the building for the circulation of the air, automatic B.M.S. coordination of the openings and a roof garden. The facades are carefully attended and treated as woven surfaces which in fact serve as different types of screens for the intense sun. The general attitude of the design is in support of green architecture.