Bloomberg European HQ

The new Bloomberg European HQ building, completed in 2015, was FMDC’s first project and was immensely important to setting up the firm and its growth and success since.

FMDC Directors worked on the design stages of the project whilst at our previous employer and took the project through to completion on site as sub-consultants. The building occupies a full City block in a 3.2 hectare site, with 2 blocks separated by a public colonnade

Bloomberg was designed by Foster + Partners, with Stanhope as Development Managers, and delivered by Sir Robert McAlpine as Construction Managers. It has won numerous awards, including the 2018 Stirling Prize, where the judges called it a ‘once in a lifetime building’ and that it had ‘not just raised the bar for office design and City planning, but had smashed the ceiling’. The façade is a composition of stone, bronze and glass, with the building awarded a BREEAM Outstanding rating.

The stone-faced piers are self-supporting, with facade beams at every other floor level, manufactured using a hybrid design of stone faced precast with a fabricated steel core – to reduce weight – required to realise the huge beam spans, at up to 18m.

Grants was the stone and precast trade contractor, innovating with the hybrid design, which is thought to be the first of its kind. The curtain walling and metal façade scope was delivered by Gartner, using a bespoke finished bronze sheet from Kikukawa in Japan, to create the distinctive projecting fins, used for solar shading and to deliver fresh air into the building floorplates.

The FMDC post-contract team undertook many quarry visits, and visits to factories in Europe, USA and Japan, to review quality of manufacture and workmanship. A key design feature at lower levels is the serrated acrylic fins, which required many design and manufacturing iterations, before arriving at a visually acceptable solution. More information on the masonry elements of the façade can be found in the stone case study section of the website.

Bloomberg European HQ

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