eLement

“I wanted the building to open up to the plaza, to the view.
To look ethereal. Αs if the slabs with their sharp corners and soft curves fly,
in their continuous movement from floor to floor.”
Rena Sakellaridou

eLement is a building that talks about movement and the passage of time. Poetic intentions, geometricity, materiality and nature work together to this end.

Having to adapt to a difficult plot facing three streets, but also surrounding another building in the middle, eLement is shaped as an L, and is getting its name by it. It retreats from the main street in order to create a plaza with a restaurant, a garden and a generous passage connecting the plaza to the back street.

The architectural intention for an ethereal form is expressed through the composition of concave concrete slabs / planes that project or retreat as they form the different floors. Movement can be seen as ‘real’, expressed in the vertical moving aluminum blinds, or in the light breeze of the plants of the planted roofs and the garden. Movement as an architectural intention, though, can also be seen as ‘poetic’ or ‘phenomenal’ in the choreography of the projecting curved slabs with the sharp corners, or the people’s reflections on the passage’s aluminum ceiling. Simple architectural gestures and choice of materials (fair faced concrete with white cement, anodized aluminum in satin or in semi-glossy finish, or the semi-transparent aluminum second skin of the double height ground floor), make eLement an elegant building.

eLement is organized on ground floor and four floors, and a two-storey underground parking. The reflective ceiling and water surfaces invigorate the passage of the entrance is. The internal layout, with a connecting lobby in the middle, allows for different tenant occupancy. Planted roofs on the 1st and the 4th floor.

The restaurant is projecting as a soft-curved glass pavilion with a concrete canopy that intensifies the passage and creates an enclosure for the plaza.

eLement is a LEED Platinum building.