With their design for an office building on Europa-Allee, Eike Becker_Architekten won an international competition awarded by the city of Frankfurt. The aim was to create a building that would refer both to the Praedium residential tower across the street and to the Europa-Allee boulevard and surrounding Europapark district. This high-rise office building consists of two slender discs which are turned out of the axis and shifted against one another and provide a stylistic nod to the Praedium's lively design language. One half of the building points eastwards towards the skyscraper silhouette through the cantilever in the upper part, and the other faces west towards the Europagarten, thus symbolically connecting East and West. The building, which is an architectural commitment to the value of a unified Europe, will become the new headquarters of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z). In the beginning of 2021, the F.A.Z. media company will move its approximately 1,000 employees from Frankfurt's Gallus district to the completed tower on Europa-Allee. Retail and gastronomy areas on the ground floor will underline the building's urban character and increase amenity values. The office tower is complemented by an eight-story hotel complex with 348 rooms.
Corporate Real Estate
Eike Becker_Architekten has worked with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the same way Rem Koolhaas designed the Axel-Springer headquarters, E2A built the taz campus, and Caruso St. John shared gave shape to the offices of Gruner + Jahr. There is a sense of spirit of optimisim circulating among newspaper publishers. Against the backdrop of ongoing digitalization, publishers are ready to invest in the future. After all, company representative offices are becoming just as obsolete as outdated technology. Modern architecture is intended to symbolize this entry into a era of media.
Architecture can be a valuable way for corporations to distinguish themselves from their competitors. But focusing on the design quality of the building alone is not enough. Instead, corporate architecture should reflect a corporate identity and overarching philosophy as well as its products and services. Ideally, the building housing the company is a the three-dimensional representation of multidimensional, multi-layered values and ideas. Due to constantly changing economic and social contexts, a corporate identity never remains entirely static, but instead grows and evolves continuously.
