The aim was to build the right environment for knowledge creation, something for which interaction among people and face-to-face contact are important. But for us, the question of the “right environment” was also a very literal one: we wanted to have a working space with the right light, temperature and air, hopefully achieved through natural means. So we asked ourselves: Does the typical office building help us in that sense? Well, typically such a building is a stacking of floors, with an opaque core in the center, and a glass skin on the outside that creates a huge greenhouse effect. So we turned such scheme inside out, provided an open atrium at the core so that people could see other’s people work. And by placing the mass in the perimeter, avoiding direct sun radiation on glass and consequently the green house effect and allowing for cross ventilation we reduced the energy consumption to 1/3.