Drone footage showing the completed base build of the new BBC Cymru Wales headquarters at Central Square, Cardiff. With ‘next generation’ web technology, the new building is the centre-piece of the Central Square regeneration project and will be the first BBC facility in the UK to use live IP Technology. Imágenes de Drone que muestran la construcción base completa de la nueva sede de BBC Cymru Wales en Central Square, Cardiff. Con la tecnología web de "próxima generación", el nuevo edificio es la pieza central del proyecto de regeneración de Central Square y será la primera instalación de BBC en el Reino Unido en usar tecnología de IP en vivo.
BBC Cymru Wales has taken possession of its new headquarters in Cardiff. Commissioned by Rightacres Property, the €114.5m (£100m) building at the site of the former bus station, had been designed by Foster + Partners, is adjacent to Cardiff Central train station and will be home to some 1200 staff.

The building is part of Central Square, a development that will include 92,903 sqm of office, residential and retail space.

Designed to be open and welcoming, visitors enter via a full-height atrium with views up to the working spaces above, as well as into a new café facing the square. The design also establishes a sense of openness and transparency between different departments to create new opportunities for collaboration and interaction. The heart of the headquarters is a 4,000-square-metre ‘hub’, which extends across three linked levels and incorporates studios, offices and production facilities. The scheme includes a sheltered garden on the roof of the hub, which is connected to a restaurant and provides a unique venue for filming, as well as a valuable social amenity for staff.
 
“Working on this project has been a truly collaborative effort. The design of the building is inspired by its unique location and the institutional heritage of the BBC, to create a distinctive icon that the people of Cardiff can be proud of. A progressive, state-of-the-art workplace for the BBC, it also forms the central focus for the regeneration of this urban quarter, and we look forward to its full opening next year,” said Gerard Evenden, Head of Studio, Foster + Partners.

The project targets BREEAM ‘outstanding’ environmental accreditation with strategies such as chilled beams, locally sourced and recycled materials and an efficient envelope. Mechanical systems have been carefully integrated to create a highly flexible interior, which can anticipate and respond to changing technologies.

Installing broadcast technology will take 18 months and the first staff are likely to move in by the end of 2019.
 
“To hand a building over of this scale and complexity exactly on time and budget is a real achievement. We signed the agreement for lease back in December 2014 and the predicted handover date was today – it has been a fantastic effort by all parties and we now look forward to completing the fit-out ready for occupation next year," said Alan Bainbridge BBC Director of Property.

Foster + Partners also produced the master plan for Central Square, a 1.5 million sq ft mixed use regeneration scheme and also designed Two Central Square which is currently under construction. The whole building has been pre-let to Hugh James Solicitors and Cardiff University’s School of Journalism.

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Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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Published on: April 25, 2018
Cite: "Cardiff Central Square - BBC Wales by Foster and Partners" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/cardiff-central-square-bbc-wales-foster-and-partners> ISSN 1139-6415
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