Project Name: Richter Center

Location: Budapest, Hungary

Design Team: ZDA - Zoboki Design and Architecture

Total Floor Area: 17000 m²

Completion: 2024

Photography: Dániel Dömölky

Feature:

Project - ZDA - Zoboki Design and Architecture has completed their latest project - Richter Center on the company's historical production site in Budapest, creating a headquarters building that both pays homage to tradition and looks toward the future. This 17,000-square-meter structure skillfully combines functionality, sustainability, and distinctive form, marking a new era for the pharmaceutical company Richter Gedeon.

The design team based their work on three main principles: functionality, innovation, and moderation, carefully crafting a corporate space that both meets efficient office requirements and presents a unique appearance. The project's most distinctive feature is its undulating façade system, where each louver follows uniform rules while maintaining unique forms, symbolizing the dual nature of research and development work: invention and strict regulation. This parametric design required new tool-based collaboration between architects and engineers, creating a unified artistic whole when viewed from a distance, while revealing precision in details up close.

The interior design continues the sense of flow seen on the exterior, especially in the building's central space, where virtuoso stair structures not only serve circulation but create places for communication and meetings. Creating large communal spaces required overcoming structural challenges, including the use of specially dimensioned steel beams and glass pillars. The design team also gave special attention to sustainability issues, such as solutions for heat absorption by large surfaces, ensuring ideal interior comfort.

What makes this project unique is how it successfully connects the Richter company with the Chemical Research and Office Building (also designed by ZDA in 2007) through a conference unit, forming a symbolic bridge that unites research and corporate management both functionally and symbolically.

Design Team - Founded in 1997, ZDA has evolved into one of the most important architectural workshops in the Central European region, establishing a determinant position in the Hungarian design market while gradually expanding into international projects, including work in China.

The firm is led by Gábor Zoboki DLA habil., recipient of the Ybl, Pro Architectura, and Prima Primissima awards, who guides the team in coupling high-quality architectural design with professional technical knowledge, further strengthened by Anglo-Saxon working principles and methodology.

The practice undertakes a wide range of project types, including multifunctional cultural centers, research buildings with state-of-the-art technology, office buildings that especially inspire human contact, as well as reconstruction assignments of historic buildings and lovely hotels and residential projects. They have created characteristic examples in all these areas, receiving numerous domestic and international awards. The studio's portfolio also extends to conceptual urban-planning tasks and feasibility studies for large-scale projects.

ZDA has achieved particularly important successes in cultural buildings with unique technological backgrounds, resulting in numerous foreign commissions. Their international connections have become extensive regarding design partners, professional consultants, and architectural offices.

The firm's services encompass the entire design process: from urban planning through architectural and interior design to the engineering coordination of construction processes, embracing international creative communities counting even several hundred persons. According to Zoboki, the architect's vocation has two facets: one humanistic, driven by ideals, constantly rethinking the conditions of human existence; the other materialistic, mastering technical and technological knowledge. He believes that to create good architecture, one must strive for high-level cultivation of both these qualities.