Nordea’s new office building in Ørestad North, Copenhagen, will house 1,800-2,200 employees and be ready for inauguration in 2016.

To the south, the building is characterised by a sophisticated, sloping park landscape and to the north by an open ground floor and tile facades on the lower floors. Nordea’s new building introduces a new medium scale in Ørestad – a street level connecting buildings and landscape.

Stage one covering a total of 40,000 m2 consists of two light, sculptural buildings placed on a base. The architectural concept reflects the functionality of the buildings. Thus, the effective office floors are all placed on top of the base, while the shared, outward functions are placed in the base.

The building is organised as a city – offering quiet, more intimate places as well as squares and streets full of life and activity. The individual departments all offer both a quiet and active section.

This functional layout promotes collaboration, innovation and knowledge sharing across departments and professional fields. The interaction between effective open plan offices and meeting places allows the individual employee to find the optimal working situation.

The building interacts with the city, opens up and invites for activity at different levels. It will be a place in the city that offers activity inside as well as outside.

The Nordea office building should achieve the highest score in the international certification system in green building, LEED. LEED evaluates the building as a whole - from programme through effective treatment of water, energy, materials, indoor climate to design process.

Henning Larsen Architects applies a unique, holistic design method, developed by the company itself. Focus is on minimiming the energy consumption of the building. This is achieved by reducing the energy consumption, then optimising the technical solutions and finally integrating solutions for energy production in the buildings.

The energy consumption of the new building has continuously been simulated through studies of volumes, materials, room heights, light and shadow, noise, wind and feasibility of indoor and outdoor spaces. Subsequently, the energy consumption has been further reduced by intelligent selection and use of efficient technologies.

With the applied methodology, the building will achieve a LEED Platinum certification, while at the same time offering an energy consumption of 41 kWh/m2/year without use of energy-producing installations. Adding the solar cell system required according to LEED, the total energy consumption will be minimised to 18.8 kWh/m2/year - far below the new 2020 energy requirements according to Danish building regulations. Nordea's new building is a sustainable role model.