Designing for the Future: Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture in Croatia
5 days ago
4 min read
In Dubrovčan, a quiet village northwest of Zagreb, fields and forest still dominate the horizon. But change is creeping in at the edges. What was once purely agricultural land is slowly becoming a patchwork of small businesses and light industry, drawn by the space and calm that only a rural setting can offer.
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
The most striking addition to this shifting landscape sits on a plot with an unlikely past: for years, it served as an unofficial dumping ground for construction waste. Rather than paving over the problem, the architects behind this new production and office building chose to work with the scarred earth itself, turning a liability into the very foundation of the design. It is a quietly powerful statement at a moment when the building industry is being asked, more urgently than ever, to repair rather than build.
Before any structure could rise, the ground itself needed healing. The construction debris was remediated and reshaped, and out of that process, three gentle mounds emerged, following the land's natural slope rather than fighting it. These mounds are not decorative gestures; they actively organize the site, defining a central gathering space and the pedestrian paths that stitch the plot together.
Technical rooms, production areas, and shared spaces are tucked directly into these mounds, each oriented toward the walkways connecting them. It is a quiet piece of choreography that transforms a former waste site into a purposeful landscape. Grass and greenery now do the work that concrete once threatened to undo, and the topography feels less like an afterthought and more like a second nature grown deliberately from the first.
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Anchored across these three mounds is the building's defining gesture: a horizontal disk, single-story and square in plan, wrapped around a central circular atrium. The form is deliberately understated, almost neutral, yet it carries a strong identity of its own. From this elevated, grounded position, the building pulls the surrounding landscape inward, producing spatial sequences that shift and surprise as visitors move through them.
Inside, the disk unfolds into a dynamic, horizontal workplace composed of offices with distinct characters and functions. Along the outer facade, enclosed offices sit alongside corner meeting rooms and informal niches designed for group work, each one angled to open toward the view beyond. Layers of transparent surfaces blur the line between one workspace and the next, encouraging the kind of spontaneous interaction that rigid corridors tend to shut down. The result feels less like a conventional office block and more like a series of connected clearings, each with its own relationship to the land outside.
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
At the heart of the disk, the circular atrium does far more than provide light and air. It houses the entrance, reception, and a scattering of hot-desk workstations, alongside a circular presentation hall and a small auditorium that opens onto a multifunctional common area and an outdoor terrace tucked into the basement level. A spiral staircase rises from this hub, leading up to a small rooftop pavilion, a terrace, and even a running track, rewarding those who climb with an entirely new vantage point over the site.
Holding this open, flowing plan together is a structural system built for restraint rather than spectacle: two prestressed concrete slabs supported by a ring of angled, V-shaped columns, four reinforced concrete cores, and clusters of inclined columns placed with quiet precision. Because the spans between supports are so generous, the interior can be reorganized almost at will, using lightweight, non-load-bearing partitions that can be moved or removed entirely. It is engineering in service of flexibility, allowing the building to grow and change without ever touching its bones.
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
What makes this project resonate is not just its form, but its refusal to separate architecture from the ground it stands on. The building enters into a genuine dialogue with its surroundings, both the wild, rural nature at its edges and the small-business landscape rising around it. As the mounded terrain continues beneath the disk itself, the atrium becomes the true center of gravity, an interior space that never quite stops feeling like the outdoors.
In reclaiming a landfill and giving it new purpose, the Dubrovčan production and office building offers a working blueprint for what industrial architecture can look like when it treats damaged land not as a problem to be hidden, but as a foundation worth building on.
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Photography by Jure Živković
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Drawing by MVA
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Drawing by MVA
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Drawing by MVA
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Drawing by MVA
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Drawing by MVA
Flexible Workspaces and Sustainable Architecture. Drawing by MVA
MVA (Mikelić Vreš Arhitekti) is an architectural practice based in Zagreb, Croatia, founded in 2007 by Marin Mikelić and Tomislav Vreš. Working across architecture, urbanism and design, the office develops projects ranging from housing and tourism to public buildings and urban spaces.
MVA has received numerous Croatian and international awards, including three Viktor Kovačić Awards, Croatia’s highest architectural honour; the Croatian State Award Vladimir Nazor; the Architizer A+ Popular Choice Award; awards at the Balkan Architecture Biennale; and the Brick Award for South-Eastern Europe. Their work has been widely published and exhibited internationally, and has twice been nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award.
