Commercial · Mixed-Use
Where automotive retail, technical service, and corporate offices share one coherent address
The National Motors Corporation Headquarters is one of HGC's most technically complex commissions — a 1 basement + Ground + 8 storey building that combines three fundamentally different uses under a single architectural identity. Vehicle showrooms, a professional maintenance workshop, and corporate office floors each have their own demands on structure, servicing, and spatial quality. Reconciling these into a unified building required careful thought from the earliest stages of the design.
Most mixed-use buildings stack residential above retail, or offices above a car park — uses that share similar structural grids and servicing strategies. This project is more unusual: the showroom floors need vast, column-free floor plates with generous ceiling heights so vehicles can be displayed effectively and driven in and out with ease. The workshop needs oil-resistant flooring, specialist drainage, vehicle lifts recessed into the slab, and heavy-duty ventilation to handle exhaust fumes. The offices above need normal 2.8 to 3.0 metre floor-to-ceiling heights, cellular layouts, and a calm, professional working environment.
HGC's structural solution used a transfer structure at the level where the showroom column grid — which is very wide to avoid interrupting the floor plates — steps down to the tighter office grid above. This transfer beam system allowed the architects to give each use zone exactly the column spacing it needed without compromise.
The ground and lower-ground showroom floors face the street with a fully glazed curtain wall, maximising visibility of the vehicle display from the road. The ceiling heights in these zones reach 5.5 metres, and the structural slab was designed to handle the wheel loads of heavy commercial vehicles driving onto the floor. Specialist drainage channels are concealed beneath the polished concrete surface, and the lighting design — a mix of high-bay LED and adjustable spotlighting — was calibrated to render vehicle paintwork accurately without hotspots.
The maintenance workshop, accessed separately at the rear of the site, is designed to the standards of a professional automotive service centre: six in-ground vehicle lifts, a spray booth with independent ventilation, a parts storage mezzanine, and a separate customer handover bay. The office tower sits above this complex programme, reading cleanly from the street as a confident corporate address for one of Ethiopia's leading automotive groups.