przemek kramarz

Over the last few years, I have been honored to be part of the team working on renovating the Prudential Building, a unique, pre-war monument of profound historic value. Much information about this building can be found online. The work I have been doing on the Prudential has been one of the most valuable experiences of my architectural practice. It is not possible in such a brief blog, to mention all the wonderful people I have been working with throughout that time, but I would like to thank them all for every lesson I have learned. In particular, I am grateful to Mr. Leszek Likus for including me in the team, and to my associates: Grazyna and Michał Grzybek, Juan, Joasia, Maciek, Grzegorz, and all the others. There are many elements in the design, that I should like to highlight, but for the moment, I will focus on some of the parts of the project drawn by myself. I hope that the full reconstruction will be written up elsewhere and when this happens, I will link to these pages.

The internal atrium consists of a facade, with the wing of the new hotel and a skylight covering the main lobby. There is a free-standing lift, which connects an underground restaurant in the rooftop bar. The preliminary concept, incorporated dense framework of external steel beams on the facade. My own brief was to produce a design that would complement the original look while becoming both slimmer and lighter. The illustrations show the original concept and the final look of the atrium.

The most challenging part of the project was the compound curve required for the new hotel’s wing facade, which we wanted to produce in the glass. After a long procurement process, only one company, Vitroform, was prepared to undertake the task of bending such large double-glazed elements in two planes. The main contractor of both steel and glass works was Alu-Glas from Krakow and I am very grateful for the cooperation of the owner, Mr. Jan Mastela, and of the engineers who supported me in the steel civil engineering work, Mr. Marek Hanusiak and Mr. Robert Krasny.

The skylight necessitated the location of installations, such as lighting, sprinklers and safety systems inside structural beams: this was a challenging part of the design. I worked on this in cooperation with the Belgian lighting company Kreon, greatly assisted by Mr. Bartek Matusewicz. A great deal of consideration went into the location of the lighting points, their temperature, color, and finish. While I am generally against the concept of totally uniform or symmetrical composition, I must emphasize that nor do I support completely random effects; instead, I consciously design a feeling of randomness inside a carefully arranged composition.

The free-standing lift is unsupported by the mass of the hotel and has no stops between the ground floor and the rooftop. It presented a number of issues, particularly around safety, but with KONE’s excellent co-operation these were overcome. I should like to thank all the engineers from the company, and particularly Mr. Roman Wozniak, for successfully coordinating all the lifts in the building, together with their interiors. You took on quite a challenge, working with us on such a demanding construction project. Thank you!