SCOPE OF WORK

Fortis relocated to 5 Aldermanbury Square, in the heart of the City of London and its financial community, uniting all its staff and operations under one roof, and giving the bank a clear London brand and presence.

The project consisted of the complete design and implementation of a high quality interior fit out, totalling approximately 175,000ft² over eleven floors, consisting of eight open plan floors, two trading floor, data centre, technical and plant space in the basements and two client/executive floors.

The seventeenth and eighteenth floors provide client and visitor hospitality areas. The seventeenth floor meeting rooms are divided by movable partitions. This allows the space to be reconfigured to create a 150 person auditorium, theatre style presentation room, or four separate presentation areas. This flexible space had to be fully supported with a flexible AV provision. Each subdivided area is fully equipped with video conferencing and presentation capacity helping Fortis to achieve their environmental goals of reducing employee travelling.

The innovatively designed glass staircase provides a link between the meeting and presentation area on the seventeenth floor to the more private client dining suites on the eighteenth floor. The construction required cutting into the existing floor slab to form a void. The staircase was constructed using two opposite structural elements; the tension of the steel stringer and the compression of the structural glazing wall. The staircase has an interactive light feature on each side, which reacts to footfall by enhancing the brightness and colour, emphasising the transition between the floors and the colours of the Fortis brand.

5 Aldermanbury Square is a multi tenanted building with all but two of the eighteen floors being fitted out simultaneously by four contractors employed by four tenants. This obviously posed significant logistical challenges – and with Fortis being the largest project on site, the primary responsibility fell to us. We worked closely with the managing agents, and other contractors, to manage the entire logistics programme. The collaborative, functioning environment this created allowed each contractor and tenant to complete their works and migration without causing delay and disruption to each other.