by Rowan Moore

Queen Victoria Street, London 

Foster and Partners’ new Bloomberg HQ boasts beehives, a wellness centre and its very own Roman temple. The City hasn’t seen such an ambitious homage to corporate power in decades.

What, you might ask, when walking around Bloomberg’s new headquarters in the City of London, are these giant cabbage leaves, these water-washed organisms surging from below, these invaders from 1950s sci-fi, doing in the pavement? They’re art, is the answer, by Cristina Iglesias. They’re there to recall the dark, squelchy side beneath the City’s whirr of calculation, layers of past life going back to the Romans, the buried river Walbrook – the Iain Sinclair/Peter Ackroyd version of London as a protean mulch of decay and mystery.

What, you might then ask, have these Hadean intimations got to do with the technological innovation of, say, the light-fittings-cum-microphones in a high-level meeting room elsewhere in the complex, which use techniques derived from stadium sound systems to capture the voices of the high-level attendees, sample the background noise and modify both such that everyone can speak in a normal tone. “Voice lift”, the only slightly creepy technology is called.

The answer this time is because this is the Republic of Bloombergia – the territory of a potent, largely enlightened financial software, data and media company so all-encompassing in its vision that it takes ownership of both the id and the superego of the City of London, its past, present and future, whole millennia of its existence. It is the reflection of the desires of the company’s founder and CEO, the arts patron, vocal Brexit critic and former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who wanted to create both a “transparent” and egalitarian” workplace and to contribute something to the city around it. This is not just an office building, or rather two buildings joined by a glass link. It’s a full-spectrum chthonic-to-celestial, cultural-social-technological, natural-synthetic, virtual-real, analogue-digital phenomenon.

Bloomberg HQ, which is said to have cost £1bn, makes its own nature. It is scrupulously ecological, with procedures, for example, for stripping the wax from the thousands of paper cups used each day. It operates a net-zero-to-landfill policy and aims for zero net water consumption. It has vacuum-flush toilets. It harvests its own rainwater. It is a “breathable” building, with fresh air passing through bronze fins in the exterior walls and leaving through vents in the roof. Its half a million LED lights are 40% more efficient than conventional alternatives. According to the official measure of sustainability, it has set new standards in office building.

It has beehives on the roof and fish tanks (both marine and freshwater) in the sixth-floor “greeting, relaxing, collaborating space”, also called the “Pantry”, at whose free food counter staff and visitors will sometimes be able to sample those bees’ honey. Its exterior structure is of 9,600 tonnes of Derbyshire sandstone, which Bloomberg says makes it the most extensive use of stone in the City of London, and possibly the capital as a whole, in a century. Its curvaceous entrance is timber-lined. The floors of the vast offices, on which up to 6,700 people can work, are also timber.

Rarely is this nature just nature. It is biobloombergology. The stone is engineered into prefabricated composite sections, seamlessly assembled. Wooden walls are micro-perforated for acoustic reasons, the floors fixed to magnetic plates, so they can be lifted easily to access the wires and pipes underneath. The ceilings are made of 2.5m aluminium “petals” which skilfully contain the requirements of lighting, cooling and acoustic absorption. And because, as I’m told, “pot plants are not something that Bloomberg embraces”, a multi-species living wall is installed in a conservatory-like space next to the Pantry. It’s all a bit Philip K Dick. Where, I want to ask, do you keep the electric sheep?

All of which is hardly to speak of the architecture per se, designed by Foster + Partners. It is, although the connections between its parts are sometimes oddly disjointed, splendid. It is hard to recall when a single company last put so much into its headquarters in the City. Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s building perhaps, in 1986, which is more spectacular on the outside. A closer relative, conceptually though not stylistically, is Edwin Lutyens’s building for the Midland Bank, a 1920s stone mountain a minute’s walk from Bloomberg, whose luxuriant interiors of mahogany, oak, marble and African verdite have recently been converted into a luxuriant multi-restaurant hotel called the Ned.

The Bloomberg complex follows a pattern common in the City, Lutyens’s bank included, of hiding a fascinating inner world behind a formal front – an analogy, that is, of the combinations of display and privacy with which the City operates. The Bloomberg elevations are gridded and regular, offering all that bronze and stone to the world, the masonry shaped and curved around columns and soffits so that it looks more like something moulded than assembled out of individual pieces. The hi-tech style with which Foster made his name has almost but not quite disappeared – there are cross-shaped elements at the junctions of column and beam that once would have been celebrated in steel, but now merge with the flow of stone.

Through an understated entrance, a choreographed sequence takes you through a lobby in aerodynamically curved timber called the “Vortex”, where lifts have been designed so that the mechanisms and structures of their shafts – visible through the glass walls of the cars – are as neat and concealed as possible. You are obliged to travel to the sixth floor, even if your business is on a lower level, in order to experience the Pantry. From here, great spiralling ramps not unlike Richard Serra sculptures take you up or down to decks of office space containing up to 800 people each, populated with special Foster-designed desks, under those glittering “petal” ceilings spreading towards infinity.

Metaphors and allusions come easily enough – it is Starship Enterprise and baroque palazzo at once, somewhat Ian Fleming, the interior of the personal volcano of a benign Blofeld. There are those aquariums and, behind a big glass wall, a majestic view of St Paul’s, as if it were itself a great stone fish captured and put in a tank. There is an interest in screens, the medium of the Bloomberg business, which tend towards maximum scale and height of definition. Some curve, and tables as well as walls display information. The framed views of both buildings and fish, meanwhile, begin to look like screens: things become screens and screens become things.

Then, on a site where Thomas More lived and may have written Utopia, there is the playing out of Bloomberg’s ideals of a working community. Open, column-free floors combine with a wellness centre, and spaces for reflection and even prayer, in order to achieve a well-balanced workforce in an open and non-hierarchic workplace. Externally, in keeping with Michael Bloomberg’s stated belief in giving something to the public, an arcade runs through the middle of what was formerly a closed-off site, lined with independent food-and-beverage outlets selected by Bloomberg’s hired food critic.