Built at breakneck speed

Over five houndred tenants were surveyed – and out of fifty office buildings across Poland one project came out on top. And this time the honour went to Wrocław

Mladen Petrov

According to Roman Woźniak of the Roman Woźniak Arkitekter studio: “The Wrocław office project was something more than just another contract.” And this is not related to the fact that the architect, who has lived in Sweden since the 1960s, knew the ordering party well – Swedish company Skanska.
Childhood memories
“Grunwaldzki Center is an exceptional project for me. Just working in Wrocław – a city with a rich history and a lot of outstanding historic buildings – was a challenge. We wanted to design a building that would be both contemporary and allude to the wonderful examples of pre-war office architecture in the city. An additional personal factor, which had a significant influence on my work on the project, was the fact that Wrocław has been my hometown for some time and my relatives still live here, so I really wanted to create a building that the inhabitants of Wrocław could be proud of,” explains Roman Woźniak.
This is how Grunwaldzki Center came into being, in cooperation with his Warsaw colleague Marek Kołłątaj and Andrzej Hubka, also from Wrocław. The three-building complex, with around 27,000 sqm of class ‘A’ offices, was completed in 2009 and is located at the junction of ul. Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie and pl. Grunwaldzki, and is 100 pct leased to such tenants as Credit  Suisse, Hewlett-Packard, AmRest and Santander.
These companies were among those that considered Grunwaldzki Center to be the best Polish project in the first Eurobuild Awards Tenant  Survey. Over five hundred tenants of fifty office buildings and parks were surveyed for the awards. Interested parties were asked to rate several aspects of the project, and the project with the highest rating was the winner. A list of the most important factors was used to weight the importance of the ratings given by the tenants.
Pros and cons
As with shopping centres and warehousing facilities, the tenants of office projects attach great value to their locations. As many as 86 of those surveyed felt that location was one of the three most important criteria for assessing an office facility. The rents charged and the working conditions in the building also figured highly in terms of importance. Green issues, the flexibility of the building and the convenience of car parks were next in the ranking, followed by the architecture of the building and the atmosphere within it. The least significance was attached to facility management. The buildings were assessed using a scale from -5 to +5.
What can be concluded from the survey carried out by the Millward Brown SMG/KRC research institute? The answers to the questionnaire raised issues that building owners need to look into. The list included such matters as negotiable lease periods, car parks for the disabled, rubbish sorting options, the transparency of charges, more efficient communication, lowering maintenance costs and improvements to the quality of the air-conditioning.
Grunwaldzki Center received top marks in a number of categories, including location with regard to the surrounding amenities (shops, services, restaurants, as well as the amount of available light) and satisfaction with the parking (the accessibility of parking spaces and ease of use). The project received the most fives in the answer to the question: “To what extent does the term ‘high quality’ match or fail to match your office building?” and ‘To what extent does the term ‘friendly’ match or fail to match your office building?’. To the question “If you were looking for office space for lease now, would you like to lease it again the same building?”, to which 100 pct of Grunwaldzki Center’s tenants answered in the affirmative. All the tenants would also like to stay in  Liberty Corner in Warsaw (developed by Von der  Heyden Group), Riverside Park (developed by AIG/Lincoln and also in Warsaw), the  Bitwy Warszawskiej Business Center in Warsaw (Ghelamco) and Globis in Poznań (Globe Trade Centre).
There were also areas in which Grunwaldzki Center did worse than its rivals. To the question, “To what extent does the office space leased by you fulfil your current needs?”, Grunwaldzki Center received 4.33 points. According to its tenants, the owner or facility manager could make changes with regard to issues such as the rents, air-conditioning, lifts and access to light.
In the eye of the investor
In July 2010, Skanska sold Grunwaldzki Center for EUR 76.5 mln. The facility is now in the portfolio of German investment fund RREEF, which constitutes the real estate investment arm of Deutsche Bank. “We decided to acquire the property because of its location in the Wrocław economic zone and its stable portfolio of tenants. Wrocław is a particularly attractive city for foreign investors. The quality of a Skanska building was also not without importance. Before finalising the transaction we also considered other projects, but finally decided that the most attractive was Grunwaldzki Center,” explains Martin Scharpey, manager of the RREEF Grundbesitz Global fund, which participated in the transaction.
“The local site development plan allowed for only one building on the site instead of the three that were required by the investor,” recalls Roman Woźniak. Finally, the studio designed a complex of three buildings connected in such a way that they can function as one facility or entirely independently. The originality of the design of the façade turned out to be too expensive – only some of the elements of the original plans were eventually left in, such as glass screens. There was no shortage of other challenges, especially since the architect admits that the design and its implementation were carried out at an extraordinary pace (a similar enterprise takes 6–7 years in Stockholm).
“We started working on the design before signing the contract with the developer. We trusted each other. Only three years passed between the purchase of the land and the opening of the entire complex. The whole complex was supposed to be built in three stages, but tenant interest forced the construction of each stage to start slightly early and consequently they merged together as one.”