THE London office of Milieu Architects has won a prestigious contract to deliver a master plan for a new super-scale business centre in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.

The Pharos Business Centre will be built by 2020 near the national airport of Milan Rastislav Stefanik, with an estimated total investment of one billion euros.

It is expected that Pharos will become Bratislava's most successful business hub, as well asoffering a variety of leisure opportunities. The centre will consist of government and private business offices, shopping centres, a market square, a central boulevard, hotels, and a multi-purpose conference hall.

Milieu is a UK-based practice of architects, master planners and urban designers with offices in London and Bratislava. The company is known for its bold conceptual ideas and design of striking buildings.

When structuring plans for international projects, the company philosophy is: "Every nation, every city, every place has its own pride, own story to tell. At the beginning of each project we try to abstract this ‘milieu'. The result is a single word drawn in form of line, translated to a building."

Already established in the luxury leisure markets with projects in the British Virgin Islands and Jersey, Milieu is gaining increased recognition for its urban regeneration plans within the mixed-use and retail sectors.

With an international design team, the company draws on skills from around the world with schemes being implemented across the UK, in Germany, Malaysia, Portugal, China, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon and Slovakia.

According to Milieu, Pharos has the potential to become the most significant business district in Eastern Europe thanks to its excellent location, advanced transport links and sustainable design.

Peter Lunter, the project architect, compared Bratislava's plans for its new district to London's Canary Wharf. He said: "The disadvantage of gargantuan developments such as Canary Wharf is that they were designed by an architectural ethos of mono-functionality.

"They were intended to serve one purpose. They are brittle and horribly inflexible, unable to accommodate any change. With this in mind, we had to ask ourselves what happens in the future, in the next 5, 10 or even 50 years and how our buildings can interact," he added.

But it is the advanced transport infrastructure that lies at the heart of the Pharos project. Lunter continued: "The project is closely tied to the European Union's plans for building the Trans-European Transport Network that wants to eliminate missing links and remove bottlenecks in the existing road and rail European network, to boost employment and competitiveness within the European Economic Area.

"As such, it will take two minutes from Pharos to get to Bratislava airport, five minutes to reach Bratislava's city centre and less than half an hour to arrive in Vienna."

The project is receiving support from local authorities and construction is expected to begin in mid-2011.