Coeur Défense: sale of the Europe largest single office block

Unibail and Whitehall Funds have sold Coeur Defense in Paris, Europe's largest single office block, to Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners and French property company Atemi for a total of 2.11 bln eur. This amount makes it the largest single office asset transaction in Europe in 2006. It also has a record high yield: generating 102.3 mln eur rent yearly, Coeur Défense has a net yield of 4.8%. The asset is a record in terms of valuation as well: in just three years and without any renovation expenditures its value increased by 56%. It also seems that the deal has been made at a record speed, just 10 days (according to Businessimmo).

Unibail and Whitehall respectively owned 51 %and 49 %of the building.
It appears that Unibail records an accounting profit of 226 mln eur, having invested 158.7 mln eur equity in the project.

The transaction shows the emergence of a new important actor on the European scene, Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partner that operates in France via Atemi.

Sources: Forbes.com, Businessimmo.info

The Louvre in the Desert

$520 million, that is the amount that Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, agreed to pay to attach the Louvre’s name to a museum that it hopes to open in 2012. And there is more: in exchange for art loans, special exhibitions and management advice, Abu Dhabi will pay France an additional $747 million.

For Abu Dhabi, the deal is an important step in its plan to build a $27 billion tourist and cultural development on Saadiyat Island, opposite the city. The project’s cultural components include a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a maritime museum and a performing arts center as well as the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel as a 260,000-square-foot complex covered by a flying-saucer-like roof, is expected to cost around $108 million to build. Planned as a universal museum, it will include art from all eras and regions, including Islamic art.Jean Nouvel is not planning to build a single gargantuan building, but rather a "microcity" -- a cluster-like collection of differently sized building types directly by the sea. The ensemble will be dominated by a great, light-flooded dome, conceived of as a symbolic link between world cultures.The dome is "made of a web of different patterns interlaced into a translucent ceiling which lets a diffuse, magical light come through in the best tradition of great Arabian architecture," Nouvel says. That he, of all people, was commissioned to design this building was kept secret until the last moment. Nouvel already crafted an architectural bond between the East and the West 20 years ago, in the form of the Institut du Monde Arabe (1981-1987) in Paris.

The project will be overseen by a new International Agency for French Museums that is to include the Musée d’Orsay, the Georges Pompidou Center, the Musée Guimet, the Château de Versailles, the Musée Rodin, the Musée du Quai Branly and the Louvre among its members.
Apart from paying $520 million to the French agency for the use of the Louvre name for 30 years, with $195 million to be paid within one month, Abu Dhabi has also agreed to make a direct donation of $32.5 million to the Louvre to refurbish a wing of the Pavillon de Flore for the display of international art.

This gallery, to be ready by 2010, will carry the name of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the founder and longtime ruler of the United Arab Emirates, who died in 2004.
Abu Dhabi will also finance a new Abu Dhabi art research center in France and pay for restoration of the Château de Fontainebleau’s theater, which will be named after Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, the current president.

For a government-owned cultural institution in France to carry the name of a corporate or foreign donor is also a first and may well raise eyebrows here. In the past, for instance, the Louvre has turned down offers of financial help from philanthropists who asked that galleries be named after them in return.

Critics of the plan accused France of “selling its soul”, but the decision was made by the French government. It owns most major French museums and, by all accounts, President Jacques Chirac has concluded that this is one global market where France can compete effectively. On matters of state, the Louvre’s opinion, reportedly unenthusiastic in this case, carries little weight.

The first shot of criticism was fired last month by three leading lights of the French art world — including Françoise Cachin, a former director of French museums — who complained loudly not only about the Abu Dhabi project, but also about the Louvre’s current three-year loan agreement with the High Museum in Atlanta and a plan for the Georges Pompidou Center to open an annex in Shanghai.Their protest that France was “selling” its museums, chiefly by renting rather than lending artworks, prompted an Internet site (http://www.latribunedelart.com/) to organize the petition endorsing their position. Among those who have signed are numerous current and former directors and curators of leading museums, including the Musée de l’Orangerie, the Musée d’Orsay, the Pompidou and even the Louvre.

One rumor circulating here this week was that Abu Dhabi had refused to display nudes or religious paintings, both pillars of Western art. But according to Le Monde, the draft agreement stated that the new museum could not reject artworks for “unreasonable motives.” Francine Mariani-Ducray, the current director of French museums, also denied that Abu Dhabi had placed restrictions on art lent by France.

Source: The NY Times Art, Spiegel Online Intl

DHL takes option to lease 25 000 m² in Eirkel Business Park in Jelgava, Latvia

by materials from Colliers International and www.europe-re.com

DHL Exel Supply Chain, the leading company in contract logistics, has signed an agreement which secures an option to lease the whole first stage that has been commissioned January this year – 25,000 m ²of warehouse premises (19,000 m² as of Jan 2007 and 6,000 m² as of Jan 2009). The whole Business Park is going to be commissioned by the year 2009, with estimated rentable area of 80,000 m².

Eirkel Business Park located in Latvia at the heart of the Baltic States provides customers with tailored solutions for logistics warehousing, light manufacturing and office space. Situated within a secure park like setting, Eirkel Business Park offers competitive rental prices and tailors terms according to the investments required for each particular business premises. Depending on the requirements, Eirkel provides space as a shell and core ready for fit out up to full turn key solutions.

The future vision of the park is for incremental growth matching the needs and demands of our current and future clients. The existing park's territory covers 49 hectares providing scope for a potential of up to 150,000m2 additional development area established in a park like setting.

Learn more about Eirkel Business Park

New Beijing airport to be world's biggest

The expansion of Beijing Capital International Airport Terminal 3 will increase the airport’s capacity from 27 million to 60 million passengers.

(picture from Foster and Partners website)
The Terminal 3 that is currently under construction covers an area of 1,480 hectares, and is far grander in size and scale than the existing terminals (would become arguably the largest airport terminal building complex built in a single phase with 900,000 m² in total floor area). It will feature a main passenger terminal (Terminal 3A), two satellite concourses (Terminal 3B and Terminal 3C) and five floors above ground and two underground. Upon completion, it is reported that passengers will be able to travel from the entrance of Terminal 3 to the farthest gate in less than 5 minutes.

“Hong Kong airport is currently the biggest of its kind. But that will be eclipsed by Beijing (…) It's the world's largest and most advanced airport building,” says the project's architect, Norman Foster.
With airports at Stansted and Hong Kong already under his belt, he should know better than anyone. “The airport will be the gateway to the city,” says Foster. “It's advanced not only technologically, but also in terms of passenger experience, operational efficiency and sustainability. It will be welcoming and uplifting, a symbol of place, its soaring aerodynamic roof and dragon-like form will celebrate the thrill and poetry of flight and evoke traditional Chinese colours and symbols.”

In short, the airport is not simply about shifting large numbers of people in and out of the city. Just as important will be its part in the conspicuous assertion of a new kind of China and its modernity. It is one of a dozen huge projects Beijing is building at furious speed to transform the city in time for the Olympic games of 2008.

For China, the Olympics are being used as the chance to make a defiant and unmistakable statement that the country has taken its place in the modern world.
The site works in three shifts, seven days a week. Nothing stops the cranes, the concrete mixers, the welders and the scaffolders. Not even the discovery of fossilised dinosaur bones that turned up in the mud ahead of the bulldozers one day, or a carved ancient stone, saved from the mechanical diggers and re-erected next to a cluster of huts.

The site is still working on the May Day holiday, when the rest of China shuts down for a week. The workers here stop only for the Chinese New Year, when it gets too cold for concrete to set properly. The site comes to a standstill and the armies return to their villages until the thaw comes. During the day they brave the dust storms and the summer heat. At night they work under arc lights. They sleep in ramshackle clusters of huts and green army tents in a series of shanty towns scattered around the site.

More about Kazakhstan and its stunning new constructions: The Pyramid

Lord Foster, 69, has designed some audacious buildings in his time, from the much-loved "Gherkin" tower in London to Beijing's new airport - right now the world's biggest construction site. He has designed - but never built - the world's tallest towers. But nothing he has done to date compares with this latest job. Because nobody asks for buildings like this. Unless you happen to be President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

With a massive oil, gas and mineral industry behind him, investors falling over themselves to catch his eye, and not much by way of political opposition, Nazarbayev can build whatever he wants in his showpiece new capital of Astana, being built according to a monumentally axial 1998 Kisho Kurokawa masterplan. And what Nazarbayev wants is religious and ethnic reconciliation.

He also wants an opera house to rival Glyndebourne or Covent Garden, a national museum of culture, a new "university of civilisation", and a centre for Kazakhstan's ethnic and geographical groups. All these will be slotted into Foster's pyramid, which is 203 feet tall and 203 feet square at the base (62m by 62m). The podium will contain an opera house.

So this is not just a talking-shop for clerics. Although with a population split 50:50 between Russian Orthodox and Muslim, and with extremism on the rise all round, you can see why it's on the president's mind. He hosted the first such congress of religious leaders in September 2003, and wants to make it a triennial event.

Made of a diamond-pattern latticework of tubular steel clad in pale silver-grey stone, the pyramid will climax in a great coloured apex of abstract modern stained glass. Bathed in the golden and pale blue glow of the glass (colours taken from the Kazakhstan flag), 200 delegates from the world's main religions will meet every three years in a circular chamber - based on the United Nations Security Council in New York. The chamber is perched high beneath the point of the pyramid on four huge struts intended, says Foster, to "symbolise the hands of peace". A research centre into the world's religions, complete with a large library, occupies the floor below.
For the general public, things are no less spectacular. The pyramid is raised on a low artificial hill - making it even taller - inside which is the 1500-seat opera house. Lifts rising up the inwardly-leaning walls - rather like the legs of the Eiffel Tower - carry you up to a middle level.

At this point more drama begins as you enter what Foster's colleagues calls "the hanging gardens of Astana". The atrium walls suddenly flare outwards, vegetation cascades round on all sides from planters set into the walls. To get up to the unearthly light pouring down from the top of the pyramid, you must walk up zig-zag ramps through these airborne gardens as if ascending to heaven.

Even Foster - not a demonstrative man - can hardly believe he has this job. "A few months ago, this didn't exist," he says as we stand in his Battersea studio in front of a six-foot tall working model of the pyramid. "It's the fastest thing that we've ever done. They've ordered the steel and it starts to be built next month. The scale of what is happening in Astana is incredible." The president works surrounded by models of the new Astana, his personal Brasilia or Canberra. He is pouring billions of dollars into it - despite the reported reluctance of his ministers, and international airlines, to make the move there from the old capital of Almaty near the Chinese border.

The climate is a problem. Temperatures in Astana range from minus 40 Celsius in winter to plus 40 Celsius in the heat of summer. It's not just a matter of insulating the building - it's coping with the yearly expansion and contraction of the huge steel and stone structure. It is being made in prefabricated sections during the winter, to be assembled in summer. Self-supporting as it rises, it will need no temporary props. The project cost is around 30 million dollars.

The project is being managed by a Turkish construction company, Sembol Construction.
Foster chose the pyramid shape because it is has no negative religious connotations. He has designed several concert halls, art galleries and museums, but says this has a greater importance. "It is primarily a cultural centre - but because it will host a peace congress of 18 religions, it becomes something else. It is about religion, peace and co-existence," he says. "It is dedicated to the renunciation of violence and the promotion of faith and human equality."

An indoor city in Astana

The 150m-high (500ft) dome, designed by UK architect Norman Foster, will be built in just over a year. The tent is being made from special material that absorbs sunlight to create the effect of summer inside. Astana lies in the very heart of the Central Asian steppe. Temperatures there often drop to -30C in the winter.

'Difficult project'
The final shape of the world's biggest tent was revealed in a 3D model by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Underneath, in an area larger than 10 football stadiums, will be a city with squares and cobbled streets, canals, shopping centres and golf courses.
The idea is to recreate summer, so that when the outside temperature is -30C, the residents of the Kazakh capital can play outdoor tennis, take boat rides or sip coffee on the pavement cafes.
Called Khan Shatyry, the project is designed by Lord Foster, who has recently built a giant glass pyramid in Astana.
"Nothing of the sort has been done before, and from the engineering point of view it's an extremely difficult project," says Fettah Tamince, the head of Turkey's development company Sembol that is building the tent.
Mr Tamince is nevertheless confident the company can complete the construction in just 12 months.

'Huge risk'
It is a hugely ambitious undertaking, but so is Astana itself.
It was just over 10 years ago that President Nazarbayev decided to move the capital from Almaty to the very heart of Kazakhstan.
Since then the government says it has spent $15bn (£7.7bn) on construction, although some believe the figure is actually much higher.
"For this oil rich state, which is an increasingly important global energy player, cash is not a problem.
Still, Mr Nazarbayev recently told the BBC that moving the capital was the riskiest step he had ever taken, and that Astana was one of his biggest achievements.
"It was a huge risk, and I took it intuitively," Mr Nazarbayev said.
I put everything at stake, including my career and my name. I knew if I had failed it would be a fatal failure, but the success would also be the real success."
At the time, the president added, no-one seemed to believe that he would be able to create a real city in the steppe.

Il y a tout ce que vous voulez ... en Chine!

L'inspiration est venue à Wang Zhe lors d'un voyage en France en 2000. Le style «splendide» de Versailles, la «majesté» du Louvre, la «noblesse» de château Lafitte, lui sont apparus comme un concentré de luxe, de raffinement, et surtout de «bon goût». Rentré en république populaire de Chine, ce jeune promoteur immobilier de Pékin, président de Fortune Real Estate, n'avait plus qu'une idée en tête : bâtir un domaine des nouveaux dieux du capitalisme dans la capitale chinoise. Cinq ans ont passé, quatre milliards de yuans (400 millions d'euros) ont coulé dans le béton, et le rêve a pris forme sur une trentaine d'hectares entre le cinquième et le sixième périphérique de Pékin. Son nom ? Le palais de Fortune. Wang, lassé des copies de suburbs américains, le must des riches Pékinois en matière de villas, a voulu faire «entièrement français». Français comme Vuitton ou Chanel, marques les plus copiées en Chine avec Gucci.

Imaginez donc, à terme, un village de 172 châteaux posés dans des jardinets à la française, avec des rues pavées et une place centrale où différents styles d'architecture s'entrechoquent. Porte principale librement inspirée de Versailles, ruines antiques en béton, arcades néoclassiques surmontées d'un clocher un peu gothique : «C'est la copie d'une église française, explique une directrice commerciale, mais cela n'a rien de religieux. Il y aura un centre commercial de luxe à l'intérieur.»

Les châteaux, construits selon les règles du feng shui, se déclinent dans les gammes Versailles, Elysée, Louvre, Lafitte, ou Alsace, et sont vendus 20 millions de yuans (2 millions d'euros) brut de béton. Compter autant pour les aménagements intérieurs. «Nous visons l'élite, explique Wang Zhe, je crois qu'il n'y a pas plus cher en Chine.» Sur les 27 châteaux pour l'instant mis en vente, une douzaine serait déjà partie. Les premiers habitants, «des businessmen», emménageront bientôt.

Le «pavillon» témoin ­ 1 500 m², dont une bonne partie perdue dans un escalier à double volée surmonté d'un dôme de 15 m de haut ­ est du modèle Louvre. «La montée de l'escalier tournant avec le tapis rouge est bouleversante, elle inspire un grand respect chez les invités, un accueil à la fois solennel et orgueilleux», annonce la plaquette publicitaire dorée. C'est plutôt le vertige qu'inspire ce Louvre : lustres de Venise, statues grecques, portraits de conquistadors, canapés Chippendale XXXL, candélabres, lits à baldaquin, piscine, jacuzzi, bar, home-cinéma, cave à vin, salle de sport, garage pour quatre voitures... et une chambre forte construite sur le modèle de la Bank of China, «capable d'accueillir une famille en cas d'attaque nucléaire». Comme dans les meilleures maisons, les domestiques ont droit à des chambres de 8 m² au sous-sol.

article an entier

Unibail shall challenge the Eiffel tower in La Défense

Unibail will construct a new high-rise building in La Défense (Paris). The jury chose Thom Mayne (Morphosis), 2005 Pritzker prize winner, as the project’s architect.
Thom Mayne, completing his first project in France, conceived a truly innovative project and broke with the architecture of the business district.



A project that sees itself both as an " icon in Paris" (an opportunity to reclaim a difficult site—in particular the project includes a joining pavilion between the tower and CNIT) and a response to environmental concerns. The Phare tower will be surrounded by a double “skin” and will have a wind park on the roof that will maximize the energy efficiency of the building. The tower is almost as high as the Eiffel Tower – 300 m² with a total area of 130 000 m² (average “tour” at La Défense has only 30 000 m²).