Ground breaking ceremony for new British Embassy, Warsaw (14/05/2008)

 

Among the invited guests were Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Grazyna Barnatowicz, the Mayor of Warsaw Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz and Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk, the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps and Papal Nuncio, who gave a short blessing.

 

„The new Embassy building is a symbol of the British will to build good relations with Poland and the Polish people. This is also a symbol of our respect for Poles as well as the UK Polish partnership in the XXI century." – said British Ambassador Ric Todd. 

In her speech, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz noted that the new Embassy would be built in a way to save energy. She also said that new buildings were changing the look and the character of Warsaw, which was now a modern and open city. „I hope that this new building will revive this part of Warsaw." – she added.

 

During the ceremony the Charter of Foundation was signed and placed into a ceremonial tube, together with an edition of that day’s Financial Times and a few British and Polish coins. The tube was then ceremonially placed inside a concrete block, which was sealed by the Ambassador and the Guest Speakers.

 

The project is scheduled to reach completion in the summer of 2009.

 

Mace, the international consultancy and construction group, is acting as design and build contractor. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) appointed Mace in December 2005 to provide design and construction services on its worldwide programme of embassy projects.

 

Designed by Tony Fretton Architects, the project has undergone a site change and redesign since the practice was pronounced winner of the FCO’s international design competition in 2003. As a result of the requirement for increased security, the project was relocated 1.6km from its original site to an area of the city devoted solely to embassies. The new site allows for greater distances between the building and boundaries.

 

Situated on Ul Kawaleri and set within its own grounds, the new location is without the established urbanity of the first site, offering a more serene setting characterised by a park, canal and alley of trees.

The 4,300m2 building has a simple form and retains the glass façade of the practice’s original competition winning scheme of 2003. It is calm and formal to the outside world, graceful as an interior and explicit in its conservation of energy.  Its long form is centralized by an attic in an elementally neo-classical way and underlined by the longer figures of the walls and railings enclosing the site.

 

The building’s glass facades, which are delineated with vertical mullions, function as the outer layer of a double facade that provides substantial thermal insulation in winter and relieves heat in the summer. Behind is a more substantial façade of windows set between solid piers and spandrels in a modulated composition. The material of this and the outer mullions is aluminium, pale bronze in colour the outer being slightly darker than the inner. This pale polychromy is a distant relative of the painted stucco buildings of the school of Schinkel, which can be seen across Europe from The Hague to Oslo and here in Warsaw.

 

Arranged over three floors, the ground floor is reserved for public activities and features a large space for exhibitions and events in addition to a restaurant and bar which open onto landscaped grounds. The remainder of the ground floor is occupied by the consular and visa section, accessible by a separate route through the grounds.

 

The administrative offices are located on the first and second floors. With two central courtyards and extensive glass facades, workspaces are amply lit by natural daylight and the second floor attic arrangement is bounded by roof terraces on both sides.

 

Each floor will have its own identity through the association between its parts and their relation to the outside world. With an acoustically absorbent ceiling, carpeted floor and double façade, the offices will be places of calm dignity. Public spaces in the ground floor will flow from one to another and into the grounds. 

Open plan office space on the first floor will be given a degree of separation by the interior courts.

 

In the comparatively small size of the Ambassadors’ suite the offices will have the scale and quality of cabinets, a theme that will continue in the small spaces for sitting that are cut out from the wide areas of hedge filling the roof terraces on either side.

 

In its larger form the roof planting relates the terraces to the grounds around the embassy and the park beyond. With these simple gestures, the embassy maintains its role in the culture and fabric of the city in which it is located.