The culture of major projects
Audrey Camus, Vice-president development and asset management, Ivanhoé Cambridge.
How would you describe your collaboration with Groupe BPCE?
Duo Towers is Ivanhoé Cambridge’s largest real estate operation in Europe and one of our major projects in terms of our global portfolio. We have developed a major projects culture in France and abroad, particularly in North America, but we always work in collaboration with our tenants. Groupe BPCE signed up very early on – which is quite rare – and was consequently actively involved in the project five years before the towers were delivered. This enabled us to take account of their specific requirements and to adapt developments in line with how their people will use the building such as, for example, the requirements of the trading rooms in the East Tower.
What is special about Duo Towers compared with the other projects you manage?
Above all, it’s the sheer scope of the project! It’s not every day that we build 110,000-square-meter buildings with multifunctional towers designed by a famous architect. It’s extremely rare in Paris to have mixed-use high-rise buildings. We have to consider the specificities of each of the functions: for example, the hotel will be welcoming members of the public in a high-rise building, a fact that requires the simultaneous application of several sets of regulations.
How do you see the future of work?
The real challenge is to make people want to come into the office. To do this, we need to develop a building’s intrinsic quality and appeal to offer a different experience. This requires the use of ‘hospitality management’ with flexible offices enabling companies to have buildings with interconnected spaces and a panoply of services of benefit to everyone. You also need to provide more meeting rooms and joint working spaces rather than more ‘traditional’ individual workstations.
How did you feel the first time you went to Duo Towers?
What impressed me the very first time was the height of the towers compared to the size of the land they stand on that is, when you think about it, quite a small plot of land. We managed to build 110,000 square meters of floor space on a plot of land measuring only 6,000 square meters!
Vice-president development and asset management, Ivanhoé Cambridge
