Phoenix Zeppelin Košice

The branch of the company Phoenix Zeppelin in Košice primarily deals with the sale, service, and rental of construction machinery. The functional and operational assignment for the described building was not simple. It was necessary to combine multiple diverse administrative, storage, and service operational units of the main operational building in the simplest and most compact architectural form possible. It was also important to establish a certain visual and architectural identity for the company in Slovakia. The building is interesting in that it is the first of several facilities of the investor in Slovakia, implemented under a broader investment plan, thus setting a standard in terms of its visual, standards, and concept for the future development of the company.

The main operational object includes, in relation to the entrance, a generous first-contact hall, on the ground floor containing a reception with service reception technicians, a spare parts sales area, and a partially separated rental operation. There are also offices for the branch management, a small meeting room, and necessary hygienic facilities for clients and employees. The hall is freely connected by a staircase to the upper floor, which contains a large open office for the sales department, a large meeting room with a kitchenette, a filing room, a space designated as changing rooms for the administrative operation employees, as well as separate hygienic facilities for this floor. The administrative part of the building is connected with the service part through a corridor on both floors. The service part contains two workshop boxes separately accessible from paved areas with a total height spanning two floors of the administrative section. Adjacent to these, on the ground floor, there is an office for service technicians, a space for the issuance of spare parts, and a spare parts warehouse. On the upper floor, the service part has facilities for service technicians with its own kitchenette and necessary hygienic equipment. The upper floor also contains a boiler room and a machinery room. The boiler room is also accessible separately via an exterior technical ladder. On the ground floor, there is a room for oil management storage and also a separate room, a storage room for rentals, accessible from both the rental area and the exterior. The eastern facade of the building includes a niche serving as coverage for the exterior shelving warehouse incorporated into it.

The material base in the administrative part of the building is a reinforced concrete skeleton with infill ceramic constructions insulated with mineral wool. In the service part, due to space economy, it is a steel skeleton with insulated sandwich panels. The compactness of the building’s exterior expression is ensured by cladding made of metallic cassettes, which compactly enclose both the administrative and service-storage parts of the building into a unified whole. The clear compositional outcome of the exterior envelope is then at the fully glazed frameless facade opening the central hall towards the entrance to the building.

The design and selection of furniture and interior elements were carried out with regard to their integration into the overall shape and color concept of the building. The basis of the building's exterior design is the effort for a sophisticated and clean architectural expression corresponding to its function and content. The composition of shapes is balanced by the composition of the used metallic facade cladding, complemented by the placement of advertising areas and shading systems of the facades as distinct shape elements.