Located for more than twenty years in the headquarters of San Donato Milanese, in June 2021 BMW Bank Italia and Alphabet Italia, started the renovation of 4000 sqm of offices, arranged from the sixth to the ninth floor of the Beta Tower.
The task was entrusted to GBPA ARCHITECTS: the studio successfully achieved the client’s challenging goal of making 3 out of 4 floors operational in just 2.5 months of construction work and completing the project in December 2021.
The architects reorganised the old offices to adapt them to the most innovative working standards, enhancing the Brand Identity of the BMW Group: the result is the made-to-measure design of four floors of offices, united by a strong identity image linked to the world of BMW, similar in planimetric layout and yet different from each other, to clearly identify the two companies in the group but also to best respond to their different ways of working.
The focus of the environment is a central island, called “Central Spine”: the area is characterised by the dynamic shape of the lowered ceiling, which offers a series of supports of different sizes, shapes and types: closed and glazed huddle rooms and booths for meetings and video calls, which can also be used as concentration spaces, and formal and informal collaboration areas that are open but can be screened by soundproof curtains.
In the open space, individual workstations alternate with circular tables for collaborative work, specially designed by GBPA ARCHITECTS; on the other hand, for individual activities that require a higher level of privacy or concentration, some closed offices are available, which can also be used as meeting spaces (office&meet).
All workstations are height-adjustable to encourage variability in posture, a sign of the BMW Group’s great attention to people’s environmental, acoustic and lighting well-being, which goes hand in hand with the sustainability of materials, finishes and furnishings.
An important innovative element in the organisation of contemporary working environments is the presence on each floor of a large informal meeting space: this takes on a different character and organisation depending on the floor, starting from a basic design consisting of a kitchenette area and small informal booths arranged around a central space which, moving from the ninth to the sixth level, changes skin without changing its nature as a “Social Condenser”.
On the ninth floor it looks like a work lounge, on the eighth it becomes a large island with an organic shape, with seats at different heights and large tanks for plants and it declines the concept of sustainability; on the seventh it takes the form of an arena, symbol of “Connectivity“, where you can organize events or small meetings, while on the sixth it is characterized as the space of Creativity and conviviality.
The “Fil Rouge” of the project, transversal to all four floors, is a mirrored and replicated triangle that composes an original decorative pattern and perfectly reflects the details of BMW Group products, unfolds on the vertical surfaces, the blind walls and the windows, on which it thickens or dematerialises according to the greater or lesser privacy required.
Finally, the architects decided to extract the key words identifying the individual floors from the Corporate Identity: Creativity for the sixth floor, Sustainability for the eighth, Premium for the ninth, and Connectivity for the seventh floor, where the connection between the two companies is also expressed.
The Italian home of the German group has never been so welcoming.
