Local studio Starh has completed an office and apartment building on a triangular plot in Varna, Bulgaria, featuring cantilevered balconies that extend out towards the nearby sea. Situated to the east of the city center, the EOS Building is only separated from the Black Sea by the Sea Garden public park, ensuring the building receives early morning sunlight. Text description provided by the architects. The Greek mythology tells us the story of EOS – the goddess of the dawn. Every morning she rose to the horizon from the depths of the sea, in order to bring the light of the day to people.
EOS Building is an office and apartment building, featuring cantilevered balconies that extend out towards the nearby sea
The project, named after the goddess, is situated at the front line in the Chaika neighborhood, in the marine capital of Bulgaria – Varna, with only the Sea Garden and the Black Sea located in front of it, ensuring that the building is the first one receiving sunlight. Save this picture! The main challenge is to create a design that fits in a restrictive triangle-shaped plot, which was the datum for its shape in plan and its distinctive spatial-volume structure. Whiteness and horizontal distribution are typical for the buildings in this area and they completely match the studio’s manner of work. The final result is a building that has a distinguishable silhouette and is open to various associations and interpretations.
EOS has mainly a residential program, the apartments are located from the fourth floor to the last, ninth floor. The ground level is intended for shops, the entrance foyer, and the car lift for the two underground levels which serve as car parking. The second and third floors accommodate ateliers and offices. One staircase and two lifts provide vertical communication. Functionally, the apartments were designed in a way that allows all of the inner spaces to have orthogonal forms. Only the loggias facing East have triangle shapes. A construction challenge was the prestressed concrete balconies in the sharp part of the building, reaching up to 8 meters in length on the upper floors. EOS is a building where It was thought not only of aesthetics and functionality but of the building’s longevity, as well. The façade materials are chosen to guarantee long life, easy maintenance with low energy costs, as well as high living comfort – aluminum windows, highly selective glazing, and fiber cement ventilated façade.
Image Credit: Dian Stanchev
