Warsaw, Poland

Stefan Kuryłowicz, founder of Kuryłowicz & Associates, along with landscape architect Dorota Pape, has developed the new Dobra 55 Research Center, a sustainable campus building, based on lightness and refined lines made of steel, concrete, and glass, on behalf of the University of Warsaw.

The new 42,000 m2 building includes 92 “language labs,” 70 administrative rooms, 39 research and development rooms, 7 conference rooms, recreational spaces, and a multimedia room that can accommodate 150 people.

The structure comprises also a library and reading areas uniting the universities’ linguistics departments into one location and bringing a high level of transparency to the traditionally enclosed urban courtyard block.

Additionally, it creates a green heart for the Powiśle riverbank district campus community.

Embracing the university by connecting the main campus with the riverside neighborhood and its much-loved library, the transparent facade opens the building up to its immediate neighborhood and its surrounding nature.

From the Wiślana street elevation with a shimmering glazed skin, which exposes its concrete structure and which is punctured by a series of courtyards, the design bursts with communal energy.

Accessible to all, the building provides a generous urban entrance in which the street corner is set back to form an entrance plinth and breakout spaces for every visitor to the building.

Next, the spatial sequences continue with a flight of theatrical stairs which form a backbone and a social “connector” throughout the remaining floors.

This “connector” starts at the street level and ends at the rooftops of the neighborhood with views over the city. 

The completed building is homogeneous in terms of its architectural form and in relation to the materials adopted, in particular, this applies to solutions both for the mass and the material decisions regarding the facades of the building.

This is primarily due to the fact that the second stage of the design is an obvious continuation of the first, whose basic assumptions were defined at the stage of the competition and confirmed in the subsequent construction project covering the entire volume of the building.

The building not only strives for state-of-the-art teaching facilities, but also for an innovative way of tackling climate change. 

It does so via renewable energy and energy-saving solutions. 

These include heat pumps with ground heat exchangers and the use of photovoltaic panels.

The project also incorporates the use of energy-efficient chillers,  energy-saving lighting systems, and use of rainwater for garden irrigation.

The interior space should make visitors feel like they have entered into an exciting atmosphere.

Within the grey hinterland of Powiśle, amongst its shopfronts and gardens, we can observe the spirit of a fragment of a city that has been growing as an organic part of the capital. 

Therefore, it was important to make the inside of the building an extension of the neighboring context with a touch of something completely new.

The unexpected yellows of the building raise the visitors’ interest as to what else may be encountered.

Here yellow isn’t just a color, but a promise of a kind of life, to which the education in this building may lead. 

The building plays a game consisting of blurring the tangible boundaries of its mass and rendering superfluous the reading of a single solid volume into something more poetic.

Project: Dobra 55 Research Center
Architects: Kuryłowicz & Associates Sp. z o.o.
Lead Architect: Stefan Kuryłowicz
Landscape Architects: Dorota Pape
Installation Team: Roger Preston
Structural Engineer Team: KIP
Client: University of Warsaw
Photographers: Nate Cook Photography