American Express

Strategic design for 24/7 operation.

The newly constructed European campus headquarters for American Express’s call centre is an exceptional building. This high-quality Cat B workplace provides a welcoming work environment, with an emphasis on daylight, views, and colour.  It features everything from a high-specification reception, and state-of-the-art training rooms, to AV/VC and TP conference facilities, gym, restaurant, and amenity spaces, plus outdoor terrace with sea views.

A sustainable strategy.

We were involved from the early stages of the project. When developing our bespoke sustainability and energy strategies, we quickly established that the site constraints, high occupant densities, and high IT power loads might make it difficult to achieve the mandatory EPC rating required for a BREEAM Excellent rating (as required by local planning policy). We therefore negotiated with the local planning authority and managed to get permissions granted for only needing to meet BREEAM Very Good.

Supporting data centre.

A separate data centre is provided adjacent to the new building to host Amex’s European network hub and communication centre. This is designed in principle as a Tier 3 building with redundant utilities and elements of fault tolerant services. As well as the MEP engineering design, we undertook a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) thermal study of the data centre. The aim was to simulate the thermal conditions to determine whether the level of ventilation and cooling performance required was met and to assess of the flow and temperature distributions in the data centre.