UNIQA Vital Business Center Budapest, Hungary

The new head office is located close to the previous one at the junction of two important traffic arteries in District XIII, Lehel út and Róbert Károly körút. The office building constructed by property developer Raiffeisen Evolution in 22 months, named the Vital Business Centre, has net usable floor space of 18,000 square metres. That means it is of a similar size to the Austrian foreign ministry,.

The nine-storey building houses all of UNIQA’s divisions, while 40% of the usable floor space will be let to other companies. Companies renting the space so far include a pharmacy and a diagnostics centre.

Árpád Ferdinánd explained that while designing the building he was guided by the principle of transparency. Transparency is one of the cornerstones of UNIQA’s business philosophy, and is conveyed in the Vital Business Centre by many glass surfaces and expansive rooms, the architect said.

Lighting up the night

A distinctive feature of the building is its LED facade, allowing colourful images and messages to be displayed on the street-facing side of the office building every evening. Although the idea is not new, it is unique in its scale: with some 80,000 pixels the Vital Business Centre currently boasts Europe’s largest LED facade.

Number of stories 11

Site size 10500 m2

Site type urban

Building area 32600 m2

Budget total 38000000 USD