The glass cube standing on a floor area of 63 by 63 meter, visible from afar, provides office areas spread across 55,000 square meters on 22 floors for the corporation’s nearly 2,000 employees. Focus of the planning phase was, apart from architecture, the development of a sustainable building concept. With success: The new building is the first office building in Germany to have received the American LEED sustainability certificate in platinum.

The Financial World as the little town’s Guest

Having not more than 20,000 inhabitants, the town of Eschborn, located at the Eastern border of the Taunus low mountain range and about ten kilometers away from Frankfurt, makes a rather contemplative impression. However, a disturbing factor within the small-town scenery is the Eschborn-Süd industrial area featuring numerous companies such as Vodafone, DB Real Estate or Ernst & Young.

Right next to them, the German stock exchange now benefits from the low business taxes as well, compared with Frankfurt at least. The 90 m high new building by KSP Jürgen Engel is composed of two L-shaped structures with a strictly gridded glass façade, encasing a building high atrium. The gigantic hall not only provides plenty of daylight for the offices oriented towards inside, but also creates an open communication space through its self-supporting bridges, foot bridges, flight of steps, lifts and meeting cubes. In formal as well as informal meetings, brokers can comment on and provide advice for the latest DAX performance.

  
Green Building  

Hard to tell which shares are going to be subscribed here and which consequences this will have for the world-wide market. The new dealing floor could definitely serve as a role-model: In order to achieve a minimum of energy consumption, KSP Jürgen Engel have equipped the new building of the German stock exchange with power-heat cogeneration, solar heat and a highly efficient heat recovery. This results in lowering the building’s primary energy consumption to 100 kilowatt hours per square meter and year, an excellent value for highrises. And in order to achieve a CO2-neutral operation, the two block heating works are only operated with biogas! It can hardly get any more sustainable than this. With that level of green commitment: Who would still complain about the globalized financial world?