When BNP Paribas set out to bring its scattered Lisbon teams under one roof, the brief went beyond consolidation. Openbook Architecture was asked to design a workplace that could hold both the intensity of collaborative work and the need for quiet concentration, without forcing people to choose between them. The result, a 38,000 sqm hub across three buildings at Parque das Nações, is less a single office than a considered sequence of spaces, each tuned to a different register of working life.
BNP Paribas Group employs close to 10,000 people in Portugal, spread until recently across separate addresses in Lisbon. The decision to consolidate the majority of these teams into a single campus at EXEO, in Parque das Nações, was as much organisational as it was architectural: a bet that proximity, shared infrastructure and a coherent working environment would do more for the group's culture than the sum of its previous offices ever could. Openbook Architecture was appointed to lead the interior architecture and the workplace design strategy across the campus's three buildings, Aura, Echo and Lumnia, which together form the group's largest office hub in Portugal.
The scale alone made this a demanding commission. But the harder problem sat underneath it: how do you design one working environment for thousands of people whose daily rhythms, roles and habits vary enormously, without flattening that variety into a generic open-plan floor?
Understanding How People Work
Openbook's answer began before any floor plan was drawn. Rather than starting from a workplace typology and adapting it to BNP Paribas, the team ran an in-depth, people-centred study of how the organisation actually worked: mapping real routines, movement patterns and the moments in a working day when people needed to connect versus when they needed to disappear into a task. Workgroups with employees surfaced a detail that shaped much of what followed: people wanted a workplace they could feel proud of, without it feeling intimidating or overly corporate.
That distinction, between pride and intimidation, is a subtle one for an interior architecture brief to carry, but it explains several decisions that might otherwise read as purely aesthetic. A hub built to impress visitors and a hub built for people to actually want to come to are not the same project, even if they can occupy the same square metres.
From Workplace Strategy to Spatial Design
The strategic question that anchored the design was simple to ask and difficult to answer: what does high performance actually look and feel like in a working day defined by constant, competing demands? Openbook's team found an unlikely but precise analogy in competitive tennis: a discipline that depends on observation, anticipation, composure under pressure and the ability to read a fast-changing situation in real time. They called the resulting concept Match Point: an office organised to support the same qualities a strong player brings to a match, rather than one organised around desks and departments.
Match Point is not a decorative theme. It is a working method that translated into a specific spatial logic, one built around contrast and legibility rather than uniform openness.
The Highlighted Workplace Concept
That spatial logic took physical form as the Highlighted Workplace: each floor organised around alternating zones, highlighted areas designed for contact, conversation and collaboration, set against quieter zones reserved for individual focus and concentrated work. The highlighted zones function as identity anchors, giving each floor a legible rhythm without resorting to rigid, permanent partitions. People can move between different modes of work over the course of a day without changing floors or booking a room days in advance.
This is a workable answer to a problem most large offices never quite solve: open-plan layouts promise flexibility but often deliver noise, while cellular layouts promise focus but often deliver rigidity. Alternating highlighted and quiet zones lets the floor plate do both jobs, at the scale of an individual walking from one part of it to another rather than at the scale of an entire building.
Collaboration, Concentration and Material Atmosphere
The tension between collaboration and concentration is addressed at more than one scale. Flexible open-plan workstations sit alongside silent pods and phone booths, giving people a genuine choice of setting, while flexible rooms reconfigure between training sessions, larger assemblies and open working formats. At the centre of each floor sits a Floor Hub, an informal gathering point positioned deliberately between the desk and the meeting room, existing because the most useful conversations in an office often happen in neither of those places. This rhythm of contact and focus is reinforced by the material palette, drawn from the clay courts of Roland Garros: warm ochres and terracottas set against deep greens, chosen to feel focused and elegant rather than corporate. Neutral tones, warm wood and natural textures carry that reference from floor to floor, keeping the workplace calm enough that it never competes with the concentration it is meant to support.
Shared Spaces and Social Infrastructure
Beyond the workplace floors, the campus concentrates its social life in a small number of deliberately different spaces. The cafeteria levels in each building were designed to be more than a place to eat: they combine hot meals, self-catering areas and a lounge zone, with a material register that shifts from the workplace floors above, signalling to anyone who arrives that this is a place to slow down rather than another zone of the working day.
At the top of the Aura building, the eleventh floor is dedicated entirely to events and visitors, housing a multipurpose event space, a fine dining area, a bar, a boardroom, meeting rooms and an accessible panoramic terrace. This is the floor where the campus turns outward, towards clients, partners and the wider life of the organisation, and its position at the top of the building is itself a statement about how the group wants to be met by the people it invites in.
Lumnia, the building that physically connects Aura and Echo, houses the shared facilities for the whole campus, most notably an auditorium complex with a main hall, foyer and visitors' lounge. Its material language, sober lines and noble materials, was chosen to make the space feel expectant and composed rather than merely large.
Alongside it, the Portugal Lab is a fully configurable ground-floor space that shifts between a work lounge, meeting rooms and a large assembly format, built for a campus whose needs will keep changing.
Sustainability as a Design Principle
Sustainability was treated as a constraint from the very first conversations, not as a certification added at the end. The campus is pursuing LEED and WELL certification, with Platinum as the target level for both. That decision shaped the architecture itself, not just the specification sheets.
The facade and building orientation were designed together to bring in natural light while limiting solar gain. This cuts the mechanical cooling load, one of the largest energy costs in any office building. The air conditioning system runs on demand rather than blanket conditioning, which meant architects and engineers had to work from one shared brief from the start. And 84 per cent of the campus's furniture was refurbished rather than bought new, a choice that takes more effort than specifying new pieces: it means working with what already exists and designing around it.
What sets this approach apart is not any single certification, but how the decisions connect. Building orientation, systems, procurement and materials were all part of one design conversation, not separate tracks joined up at the end.
Designing for the Future of Work
The BNP Paribas Hub is a large and complex project, delivered at a scale few interior architecture practices in Portugal ever take on. But its real claim is quieter: that one workplace can hold both contact and concentration, both ceremony and routine, without forcing people to choose. Whether that holds true after years of daily use, not just the first few months, is the real test for any project like this. For a campus BNP Paribas has called a long-term commitment to Lisbon and its people, that is also the truest measure of success.
