Photo gallery from a bird’s flight: what the rising business centre in former clay mines looks like

In the photo gallery, you can see what Sand Offices looked like when work started in January and what it looks like now when the ground floor is up.

‘The design of the building we have chosen allows us to work quickly and to a high standard. The business centre is being built using precast reinforced concrete. This means fewer columns inside the premises and a lighter layout and engineering network solutions,’ Barštys explained.

According to him, using clinker bricks for the facade is a rare architectural choice in Lithuania. Clinker bricks are commonly used in Western European cities for their durability, quality, and naturalness.

The Sand Offices business centre site, currently under construction, was the site of clay mines and brickworks several hundred years ago. The bricks produced there were used in constructing the old brick buildings of Vilnius that still stand today.

‘In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Šnipiškės was one of the most important districts for the ceramics industry,’ said Barštys. ‘A large area east of Kalvarijų Street and north of the former Ukmergė Street was occupied by clay and limestone quarries. Workers often found mammoth bones in the quarries, for which the area was famous. Combining these two historical facts of the area, the vision of the business centre emerged – Sand Offices was built using beige shades and, of course, environmentally friendly architectural solutions.

Capitalica Asset Management (www.capitalica.lt) is an investment management company that manages investment funds investing in commercial real estate and non-equity securities in the Baltic states and the European region. The company manages 12 properties – 108,000 m2 of real estate, with another 20,000 m2 under development. Drawing on its expertise in capital markets, real estate, and investment funds, the company provides private and institutional investors with stable returns. Capitalica Asset Management funds are licensed and supervised by the Bank of Lithuania, and the bonds are listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. The company is majority-owned (70 %) by SBA Group, one of the largest Lithuanian business groups, and 30 % by Fox Holdings, the company owned by Andrius Barštys, the Chairman of the Board of Capitalica Asset Management.