Commercial · Mixed-Use
A commercial tower designed for the flexibility and adaptability that modern business demands
The Technostyle Building is a mixed-use commercial development in Addis Ababa that brings together retail showrooms, office floors, and supporting facilities within a single coherent building. The project brief called for a building that could serve multiple tenants with different spatial requirements simultaneously — a demand that requires careful thinking about structural systems, servicing strategies, and vertical circulation from the earliest design stages.
The defining challenge of commercial office design is flexibility: the ability for a building to be divided, reconfigured, and re-let to different tenants over its lifetime without structural alteration. HGC's structural solution for Technostyle uses a column-free perimeter frame with a central service core, creating floor plates that can be divided anywhere without encountering a structural obstruction. Ceiling heights of 3.2 metres in the office zone give the building a sense of quality and spaciousness while leaving sufficient void for services above a suspended ceiling.
The ground and first floors are designed as retail showrooms with the large clear spans and high ceilings that commercial display requires. Full-height glazing to the primary street elevation gives maximum visibility to displayed products while the structural frame is set back to create a covered arcade at pavement level — providing shelter for pedestrians and animating the street frontage throughout the day.
The facade of the Technostyle Building was designed to establish a clear and recognisable commercial identity on its street. A rhythm of vertical fins at the upper office floors creates depth and shadow across the facade, reducing its apparent mass while giving the building a textured quality that reads differently in different light conditions. At ground level the facade opens fully to engage with the street, while the transition between retail and office is marked by a change in facade treatment that allows each zone to read as its own entity within the unified composition.
Material selection balanced durability, maintenance cost, and visual quality. The primary facade material is a high-quality render in a neutral tone, with expressed concrete columns and aluminium window framing providing tonal contrast. The building is designed to age well — avoiding fashionable finishes that date quickly in favour of honest, robust materials that will look appropriate in twenty years as much as they do today.
MEP systems were designed with the different demands of retail and office occupation firmly in mind. The retail floors have high cooling loads from display lighting and customer footfall; the office floors require more controlled environmental conditions with individual zone temperature control. The BMS integrates both zones under a single monitoring platform, allowing building management to track energy consumption by zone and identify inefficiencies. Solar shading from the facade fins reduces cooling loads on the office floors by approximately 15%, meaningfully reducing the size of the mechanical cooling plant required.