Bureaux Andrew Phillips has completed Emerald, a new office building on a major thoroughfare leading into the City of Luxembourg. The project forms part of a broader mixed-use development expanding the city’s southwest.
Commissioned during the early days of the pandemic and completed in 2025, the building was conceived as an architectural framework capable of accommodating changing workplace models. Its design explores how an office building can remain open to future adaptation while retaining a clear architectural identity within the city.
A facade shaped by depth, light, and movement
Emerald stands out against the more neutral tones of its surroundings through a genuinely three-dimensional facade. Depth, rhythm, and material articulation engage light and shadow throughout the day, allowing the building’s character to shift gradually through time and movement rather than relying on a single fixed image.
Ribbon windows are framed by vertical and horizontal fins set at alternating angles, creating a textured surface that, from certain viewpoints, recalls a deep woven curtain. The British Racing Green finish shifts in tone from dark grey to bright emerald depending on the light, giving the elevation a changing quality across the day.
All aluminium facade components share the consistent dark green polyester powder-coat finish, applied across the fins, cladding panels, window frames, canopy, eaves, and roof screens. Although the underlying assemblies vary in construction and substrate, the continuous colour treatment gives the building a unified visual presence.
Passive shading and solar control
The facade also serves as the building’s primary environmental control strategy. Its deep fin assembly provides passive solar shading across all orientations and seasons, with the angled vertical elements shifting the shading geometry as light conditions change throughout the day and year.
A fully automated solar blind system is integrated within the facade assembly. Together, the fixed shading geometry and responsive blinds help manage solar gain while maintaining daylight and outward views.
Reworking the central core
Emerald also became a testing ground for different ways of organising office space. The conventional central core was rethought and broken open, with stairs, lifts, and WCs redistributed towards the perimeter rather than concentrated centrally.
This offset, asymmetric core arrangement frees the floorplate and, together with a rational structural grid, allows each level to be configured in different ways. Floors can be arranged as cellular offices with a racetrack circulation spine, as deep open-plan workspace, or as separate units for multiple occupants.
The shift also blurs the boundary between leased space and common space. Circulation becomes shared territory rather than residual space, supporting encounter, visibility, and ease of movement. Internal vertical circulation routes receive daylight and open to external views, giving these areas a spatial role within the building rather than treating them as back-of-house infrastructure. For tenants occupying multiple floors, movement through the building becomes part of the working environment, with circulation designed to feel more like internal streets.
A working environment shaped by light and movement
These decisions were guided by care rather than novelty. Access to daylight supports well-being, while clear organisation reduces friction in daily use. Circulation is treated as part of the architectural experience, not only as a functional requirement.
Together, these qualities create a working environment that supports both concentration and collaboration without imposing hierarchy or formality. Emerald shows how architectural presence and adaptability can coexist, creating an office building that can respond to change while offering a more grounded experience of work.
