The Park Inn Hotel in Cracow is at Monte Cassino Street, close to Rondo Grunwaldzkie, the Vistula River and Wawel Castle. It is the first facility of this hotel chain in Poland and has 152 hotel rooms.
The metallic, oval building designed by the German architect Jürgen Mayer in cooperation with the Ovotz Design Lab, a Cracow-based architectural studio, is an example of progressive architecture.
It brings a new quality and standard to the architectural environment and the local hotel market. Characterized by a unique, organic shape, it was made with great care. The designers intended to move away from the typical form of a box hotel with monotonous rows of repeating windows, offering instead a fluid and dynamic shape. The main architectural idea was the consistent interpenetration of light and dark, concave and convex stripes, creating a relief surface.
At the conceptual stage, the designers named the hotel SOF, short for "stepped on frog", because the facility design with flattened arms with flattened arms reminded them of a trampled frog. As a result, the building resembles a light boulder with dark cracks, a cross-section of tissue, or a plant with visible rings.
The facility mass spreads over almost the entire plot. The parking lot is placed under the building but extended significantly beyond its outline to accommodate as many cars as possible. The two lowest floors of the hotel are public areas. On the ground floor, there is a lobby with a restaurant and bar and the facility's administration, while on the first floor, there is a business centre with conference rooms.
Above, there are 4 floors with hotel rooms in a corridor arrangement in an L-shaped building, the arms of which open to the Vistula River. One of the room arms is extended beyond the base of the building to increase the number of rooms. This overhang is supported by a sculptural leg, which conceals an additional emergency staircase. The rounded leg, together with the overhang, creates a kind of gate, a funnel carved into the body through which cars pass. The support planes bent in all directions posed a challenge for the contractor. To facilitate this task, designers from the Ovotz studio built a large-scale plaster model of this part of the building.
The façade is covered with alternating shiny, light aluminium panels and recessed, dark, matte stripes. The hotel room’s windows are between the dark stripes of the building's façade. Large full-height windows surround the public areas of the hotel.
Metallic skin covered almost the entire building except for the rear façades, where plaster was used in colours matching the panels.
To offer guests comfortable quiet rooms, free from the noise of the surrounding busy roundabout and street, most of the window glazing was made using Pilkington Insulight™ Phon insulating glass units using sound insulating laminated glass with excellent noise control properties.
Pilkington Optiphon™ with a thickness of 9.1 mm used in IGUs helps achieve acoustic insulation of the windows at the level of 45 dB.
To ensure thermal comfort in the hotel during the colder months and reduce its operating costs, Pilkington Insulight™ Therm insulating glass units with low emissivity properties were used in the remaining windows of the hotel.