Architecture firm Foster + Partners completed ICÔNE, a new office complex in Belval, a new city quarter combining research, education, leisure and commerce programs, in Luxembourg. The 18,800 square-metre office building, dialogues with the rich industrial heritage of Belval.

The volume relates to the scale of neighbouring buildings and addresses the different characteristics of the surrounding streets. Its entrances are articulated differently in response to Porte de France, the main urban street to the west and the Place de l'Académie to the East. The scheme is targeted to achieve a BREEAM Excellent rating and will be WELL Building Standard® certified.
“We are delighted to celebrate the opening of this landmark project for Belval, which we began designing in 2016, well before the pandemic began. Covid has highlighted the need for healthier and more flexible urban workspaces, which is exactly what this project provides. The light-filled central atrium is the beating heart of the complex, promoting collaboration and enhancing employee wellbeing.”
Darron Haylock, Partner, Foster + Partners.

The building, designed by Foster + Partners in collaboration with local practice BFF architectes, is arranged as two wings enclosing the central atrium, wrapped by a distinctive orthogonal façade and roof which emphasises the structural grid and gives the building appropriate to its industrial setting. The historic and symbolic Belval blast furnace forms the central focus of the dramatic vista from the atrium.


ICÔNE, a office complex by Foster + Partners. Photograph by Nigel Young / Foster + Partners.


ICÔNE, a office complex by Foster + Partners. Photograph by Nigel Young / Foster + Partners.

The atrium resolves the level changes between the street and the plaza through a series of stepped terraces which create a spectacular arrival sequence. The open circulation adds to the vibrancy of the internal spaces, with communal green landscaped terraces for informal meetings and break-out spaces at higher levels as part of a rich and varied whole.

The façade is both structural and environmentally responsive, providing an integrated solution which allows for internal column-free office spaces as well as solar shading and maximised internal daylight. The external façade benefits from a series of external green loggias, visible from both the inside and outside of the building.

More information

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Architects
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Foster + Partners.
Collaborating Architect.- Beiler François Fritsch.
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Collaborators
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Structural Engineer.- NEY.
Quantity Surveyor.- Q-Build Luxembourg.
Environmental Engineer.- Greisch Luxembourg.
Lighting Engineer.- Greisch Luxembourg.
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Client
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BESIX RED Luxembourg.
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Area / Dimensions
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18,900m². Height.- 30m.
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Dates
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Appointment.- 2016.
Completion.- 2022.
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Location
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Porte de France, Belval, Luxembourg.
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Photography
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Nigel Young.
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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: January 26, 2023
Cite: "ICÔNE, a office complex by Foster + Partners. Remembering the fever of Urbicande by Schuiten" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/icone-a-office-complex-foster-partners-remembering-fever-urbicande-schuiten> ISSN 1139-6415
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