Vivico has completed the first office building in Frankfurt’s Europaviertel. The building, located at Europa-Allee 12-22, will in future serve as the German headquarters of the banking organisation BNP Paribas . The Group has therefore decided to rent around 67 percent of the building’s office space, where it will bring together various areas of the organization, previously located in several different locations.

The first employees have already started work there, moving in on Monday, and eventually a total of 600 BNP Paribas employees will be based in the building. Even before building began, Vivico had transferred the property to UniImmo: Deutschland, an open-ended property fund from Union Investment Real Estate GmbH in Hamburg. The office building, designed by Schneider + Schumacher, offers nearly 34,000 m² (366,000 square feet) of office and commercial space. On October 1st,the ground floor of the building saw the opening of restaurant Loft 52, the brainchild of renowned Frankfurt restaurateurs Angela and Thierry Muller.

The building was designed and realised with sustainability in mind. Alongside saving natural resources and the environment, particular emphasis was placed on the efficiency of the building and the quality of time spent there. The building was therefore equipped with numerous green courtyards, whose thermal effects help to reduce the amount of energy needed to heat the building. Even before the two-year building phase was over the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen e. V. (DGNB) had awarded the building a provisional “silver” certificate. Construction was carried out by Vivico’s subsidiary company omniCon Construction Management.

Following a planning and development phase lasting several years, the creation of Frankfurt's Europaviertel on the site of the former container station has moved up a gear over the last few years. The process got underway with the Mövenpick Hotel, constructed by Vivico in 2006 and subsequently also sold to Union Investment in 2009. In the meantime, several residential buildings have been completed on the Europa-Allee, as has the Meininger Hotel, also constructed by Vivico. By the end of 2011 there will already be around 800 apartments in the new district. This autumn PricewaterhouseCoopers will also move into the base building of Tower 185 with around 1,600 employees, and around 1,500 more staff will follow once the 200 metre-high tower is completed at the end of 2011. Overall it is expected that the Europaviertel will be home to around 5,000 people, with around 30,000 working in the district.