Thus, now all the five office buildings owned by the company in Romania are Gold warranted, in different crediting systems. GTC recently announced that starting 2021, it uses renewable energy sources for all these buildings, as part of the company’s commitment to providing clean energy for its assets all over Europe.
Cascade Office Building is one of the iconic office projects in Bucharest, situated in a key area of the city, on Strada Buzești 62-64, at 7minute walking distance from Victoriei Square and 20-minute drive from Henri Coandă International Airport. The 4.210 sq m building was completed in 2005 and includes energy-saving and many other modern elements such as smart lighting, ventilation systems or local temperature controllers, access control and CCTV monitoring. The LEED Gold certification process for Cascade Office Building took 7 months and was granted following the evaluation according to seven criteria, such as: the projects’ sustainability, energy efficiency and ventilation, useful materials and resources, the quality of the indoor environment, innovation, location and transportation proving that Operations and Maintenance (LEED Operations and Maintenance) were performed in excellent conditions.
The office buildings owned by GTC in Romania are: City Gate (City Gate North Tower and City Gate South Tower), Cascade Office Building, Premium Plaza, and Premium Point. All were Gold certified or recertified in the last three years as follows: City Gate South Tower upgraded from LEED Silver to Gold certification; City Gate North Tower achieved the LEED Gold recertification; and Premium Point and Premium Plaza projects were Gold recertified in DGNB (German Sustainable Building Council) system.
“Obtaining the LEED Gold certification for Cascade Office Building is a major accomplishment for our sustainability agenda that was reassumed in our 2020 ESG report. GTC’s commitment in the future is to develop or acquire only highly efficient green buildings with energy-saving solutions that respect the environment and provide the tenants’ employees with the best working conditions. Right now we are in the middle of a complicated climate, created by the pandemic. I think we can surpass all the challenges of this period by adapting to the new way of work and upgrading our buildings in every possible way. Currently, thanks to the hard work of our Romanian team, each square meter of our projects located here is Gold certified, which is a very important achievement '', commented Ziv Gigi, Managing Director of GTC Romania.
GTC Group was founded in 1994 in Poland and is a public company, listed on the Warsaw and Johannesburg Stock Exchange and one of the largest developers of commercial and office spaces in Central and South-Eastern Europe, active in six countries: Poland, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. GTC Group has a portfolio of projects valued at almost 2.3 billion euros, which includes 46 buildings and 1,300,000 square meters. The company entered the Romanian market in 1999 and has fast become one of the most important real estate developers locally, with a portfolio consisting over time of both office buildings, shopping centers, and residential complexes. The company developed and sold the emblematic America House and Europe House office buildings, located in the center of the capital, the Galleria shopping centers (Arad, Buzau, Piatra Neamț, Suceava) and the FeliCity and Rose Garden residential complexes in Bucharest.
Among the GTC projects, currently owned by the company in Romania, are the City Gate office complex (the first functional office project in Bucharest that obtained LEED GOLD certificates in 2013), Premium Plaza, Cascade, Premium Point. GTC Romania's vision is focused on the sustainability of constructions and on the transformation of the way buildings are designed, developed and managed, so as to contribute to the creation of a healthy environment and to increase the quality of life.
