China Construction Bank Students Visit Bloomberg

8 May 2019

Our China Construction Bank Executive Students were honoured to be able to tour the Bloomberg London Building in the afternoon of 8 May. Bloomberg LP is a privately held financial, software, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. Bloomberg L.P. provides financial software tools such as analytics and equity trading platform, data services, and news to financial companies and organizations through the Bloomberg Terminal (via its Bloomberg Professional Service), its core revenue-generating product. Our China Construction Bank students were incredibly interested in the building itself and amazed at the transparency of the whole building – a symbol of the corporate culture, as well as how learning more about the Bloomberg Terminal and what could be monitored and analysed through it.  

Our students were thrilled to be able to sit inside one of the training rooms and get a look at the Bloomberg Terminal first hand as well as sit at a computer with one of those famous Bloomberg keyboards!

The Building

Bloomberg’s London office opened in 2017 and functions as the organisation’s European headquarters. The building was designed by Foster and Partners and constructed by Sir Robert McAlpine and is spectacularly sculptural. It consists of two buildings linked via bridges and is clad in 9,600 tonnes of Derbyshire sandstone with bronze ventilation fins. Inside, the floors are linked by custom glass lifts and a 210m helical bronze "ramp", which dominates the interior of the building. The cores of the building are on the outside, to create a single open-plan space inside and it gives a feeling of transparency throughout. The double height pantry is one of the stars of the show with a stunning view of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Our students enjoyed the amount of art on show as well. Inside the building features works by Olafur Eliasson, Pae White, Ben Langlands, Nikki Bell and Arturo Herrera among others. Outside, there is a three-part sculpture called "Forgotten Streams" by Cristina Iglesias, which evokes the Walbrook river.

In July 2018, it was announced by RIBA as the overall winner of the 2018 Stirling Prize after being shortlisted along with Bushey Cemetery, Chadwick Hall, the new build at Tate St Ives, Storey's Field Centre and Eddington Nursery and the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre.

It was an incredibly interesting and insightful tour giving a look into what Bloomberg does, how it does it and what it is contributing to the future of data, finance, news and technology.