HOP hub is the retrofit of a six-storey postmodern office building in Warsaw, originally opened in 1996 near the historic Chmielna street area. Designed by Loskiewicz.Studio, the project reworks the facade, public square, common interiors, restaurant frontage, tenant workplaces, underground parking, and support facilities to extend the life of a recent urban layer often dismissed within the contemporary office market.
HOP hub Technical Information
- ArchitectsLoskiewicz.Studio
- LocationChmielna street area, Warsaw, Poland
- Project YearsOriginal building opened in 1996; retrofit in 2020s
- Photographs© PION Studio, © Jacek Kolodziejski, © Aleksander Malachowski
The whole building is your workspace.
– Anna Loskiewicz-Zakrzewska
Reframing a 1990s Postmodern Office Building
HOP hub approaches the 1996 office building not as an obsolete container but as a fragment of Warsaw’s post-socialist architectural history. Its preservation is significant because many commercial buildings from this period occupy an uncertain position: too recent to be widely protected, yet old enough to be considered aesthetically unfashionable. The retrofit rejects the assumption that replacement is the natural destiny of such structures and instead treats the building’s postmodern language as material for reinterpretation.
The exterior maintains the block’s graphic discipline while sharpening its presence through color, pattern, and a clearer window rhythm. The white upper facade, small square openings, orange frames, reflective glazing, and black-and-white striped elements produce a reading closer to urban collage than corporate neutrality. Against the background of Warsaw’s high-rise financial district, the building no longer tries to compete through scale or transparency; it asserts difference through surface, proportion, and pictorial order.
This strategy is most productive where it works with the building’s difficult qualities rather than concealing them. The curved glass at the base, the compact window grid, and the postmodern massing are not erased by a generic curtain wall. They are intensified into a coherent visual system, suggesting that architectural value in late twentieth-century commercial buildings may depend less on purity than on the capacity to absorb revision without losing their original character.
From Office Lobby to Shared Interior Landscape
The ground floor has been reorganized as a shared interior landscape, extending the conventional lobby into a sequence of lounge areas, coworking spaces, meeting rooms, booths, and informal seating. This shift changes the building’s social logic. Circulation is no longer treated as residual space between leased floors, but as a collective zone that supports work, waiting, encounter, and temporary occupation.
The six-story atrium provides the main spatial anchor. A central green-marble-clad core, visible balconies, a glazed roof, and layered perimeter circulation give the void a legible vertical structure. Rather than leaving the atrium as a neutral corporate volume, the design uses patterned surfaces, sculptural columns, and contrasting materials to make movement through the building visually continuous. The atrium reads as both an orientation device and an interior street.
Material articulation is central to this transformation. Cork walls, green marble stairs and fittings, terrazzo floors, upholstered booths, acoustic curtains, custom textiles, and carved or slatted elements introduce density at the scale of the hand and body. The palette resists the flatness of many office refurbishments, where neutrality is mistaken for adaptability. Here, tactility becomes a functional tool, softening sound, marking zones, and giving common spaces enough specificity to encourage use beyond formal reception.
Public Interface and Urban Activation
The retrofit extends beyond the building envelope through the redesign of the front square and the opening of the ground floor toward public use. In its previous condition, the building occupied a central yet overlooked fragment of the city, close to major urban axes but detached from everyday pedestrian life. The new frontage addresses this condition by linking interior programs with external terraces, planting, awnings, and a more expressive ground-level facade.
The restaurant and terrace operate as a threshold between the office and the street. A curved coral pergola, graphic planters, outdoor seating, and black awnings translate the building’s postmodern vocabulary into elements that can be experienced at pedestrian scale. This is not simply decorative continuity. The exterior furniture, planting, and canopy structures slow the pace of arrival and create a more porous edge where the office building participates in the public realm rather than withdrawing behind a glazed lobby.
The site’s urban reading is complicated by its position between Chmielna Street’s historical fabric and the nearby skyline of towers, including Warsaw’s most visible symbols of twentieth- and twenty-first-century urban change. HOP hub mediates these conditions by refusing both historical mimicry and corporate abstraction. Its patterned surfaces and compact massing give the street a recognizable foreground, while its programmatic openness allows the building to function as more than a private office address.
Adaptive Interiors, Material Reuse, and Programmatic Diversity
The intervention broadens the office program through a range of additions: bicycle parking above- and below-grade, sports locker rooms with showers, upgraded underground parking, electric vehicle charging points, tenant workplaces, hospitality spaces, and an artist residency apartment. These elements reflect a shift in office architecture from single-use efficiency toward mixed rhythms of occupation. The building accommodates work, display, dining, commuting, informal gatherings, and temporary domesticity within a single adapted structure.
Reuse is addressed through both the conservation of the existing building and selective material strategies. Restored vintage furniture, retained kitchen elements, cork flooring, natural stone, recycled acoustic panels, and demountable details reduce the dependence on demolition and replacement. The project does not present reuse as a purely technical exercise. Instead, recovered patterns, textures, and furnishings become part of the architectural language, allowing the retrofit to acknowledge age without becoming nostalgic.
The tenant interiors demonstrate how the renewed identity can support different spatial registers. One office uses curved glass blocks, curtains, artworks, and a gallery-like circulation sequence to organize a workplace around visual discovery. Another combines timber, glossy ceilings, mirrored columns, planting, and domestic-scaled rooms to create a more experimental work environment. The artist residency apartment introduces a quieter scale, with vintage chairs, warm curtains, mural surfaces, and domestic furniture establishing a counterpoint to the building’s larger public and commercial spaces.
