Foster + Partners won the RIBA Stirling Prize for the recently completed Bloomberg HQ in London
Foster + Partners reached a record turnover of £258m in 2019, with 90% of that total generated outside the UK.
The company’s results for the year to 30 April 2019 showed that turnover had increased strongly from £212.5m last year. Pre-tax profit fell slightly to £26.6m, down from £27.3m the year before.
The business, which was founded in 1967 and employs around 1,300 people worldwide, opened new offices in Shenzhen in China and in Dubai during the year, while the number of its employees in San Francisco, Singapore and Shanghai increased.
During the year, the business also won the RIBA Stirling Prize for its recently completed Bloomberg headquarters in the City of London, making it the only practice to win the accolade three times.
Chairman and founder Sir Norman Foster said that digital models of buildings’ environmental performance was one of the most significant differences between when he started the practice and today.
He said: “Since the inception of Foster + Partners we have witnessed an invention and proliferation of voluntary green systems for buildings. LEED and BREEAM are the most well known of around 250 such standards. It is a source of some pride that we have achieved record-high ratings under these systems. However, our research is telling us that even if buildings conform to the highest of these standards, they will still not adequately address the Paris Agreement goal of containing the increase in the planet’s atmospheric temperature to 1.5C.
“New versions of these rating systems will take three to five years to come into place and major projects typically take ten years to realise. The challenge is to translate this knowledge into advocacy and action by sharing and working with those that commission buildings and infrastructure.”
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