The European Central Bank Headquarters is a building complex under construction in the Ostend district of Frankfurt am Main. It includes the existing Großmarkthalle, a new 185/165-metre-twin-skyscraper and a new low-rise building to connect the two. Located east of the city centre it will house the new headquarters for the European Central Bank (ECB). It is expected to be completed in 2014.
The ECB’s headquarters is legally required by the Treaties of the European Union to lie within the city limits of Frankfurt, the largest financial centre in the Eurozone. The ECB currently resides in the Eurotower and, due to lack of office space there, in two other high-rise buildings (Eurotheum and Neue Mainzer Straße 32-36) in the city centre of Frankfurt.
In 1999, an international architectural competition was launched by the bank to design a new building. It was won by a Vienna-based architectural office called Coop Himmelb(l)au. The building will be approximately 185 meters tall and will be accompanied by other secondary buildings on a landscaped site on the site of the former wholesale market (Großmarkthalle) in the eastern part of Frankfurt. The main construction work was planned to commence in October 2008, with completion scheduled for before the end of 2011.
Construction was planned to start in late 2008, but was put on hold in June 2008 as the ECB was unable to find a contractor that would build the Skytower for the allocated budget of €500 million[9][10] due to the bidding taking place at the peak of the pre-late-2000s recession bubble. A year later with prices having fallen significantly the ECB launched a new tendering process broken up into segments. With the project back on, the ECB plans to move in mid-2014.
It is expected that the building will become an architectural symbol for Europe and is designed to cope with double the number of staff who operate in the Eurotower.
