PL

European Centre for Geological Education is nearing completion

PLN 30 mln – the budget for the construction of the European Centre for Geological Education, which was commissioned by the University of Warsaw and is nearing completion in a former quarry in Chęciny outside Kielce. After two years of construction work the centre is now set to open in the autumn. Its design, which is the work of the WXCA architectural studio, has already received an honourable mention from the International Property Awards. At the end of September the authors of the design are to fly to London to collect the award. The European Centre for Geological Education is a branch of the University of Warsaw in Świętokrzyskie province. On the 2.77 ha development site, five buildings now exist connected with each other by corridors, including a lecture theatre and a canteen in the main section, laboratories and lecture rooms in the laboratory and teaching section, as well as beds of various standards in other sections. The net useable area of the buildings comes to almost 6,400 sqm. Among the attention grabbing features are the walls of the conference room, which have been integrated with the defunct quarry, allowing over 240 conference participants to admire the bare rock at one time. The main source of heat and air-conditioning for the buildings is a system of heat pumps with a ground heat exchanger fed through 91 boreholes with depths of up to 120m. While this is taking place, the water in the complex is heated using solar panels. “One of the main design challenges was integrating the complex with the unique area of the exploited quarry. We managed to do this thanks to the use of the local materials, such as limestone, extracted in the course of the construction of the centre, as well as the local xerothermic plants on nearby roofs and around the site. An additional difficulty was the tight budget for the project,” emphasises Krzysztof Budzisz, the chief architect at WXCA. The general contractor for the project was Anna-Bud.

The last picture was taken by Daniel Ciesielski.

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