03 December 2013 – Negotiations for the procurement of a lot and building for the Philippine Embassy and Ambassador’s Residence in Berlin started off on its first round, with general developer Groth Development GmbH & Co KG (Groth Gruppe) from Berlin meeting the Embassy’s Bids and Awards Committee (BAC) in the presence of its technical and legal advisers and Ambassador Maria Cleofe R. Natividad on November 26.
Ambassador Natividad welcomed the participants to the two-hour negotiations that took place in the Embassy, encouraging them to conduct the negotiations in a constructive manner towards a fair and satisfactory conclusion. At the rate the talks are going, the contract signing might be expected in the first quarter of next year.
The proposed project is a five-storey building on Von-der-Heydt-Strasse in Berlin’s prime diplomatic quarter at Berlin-Tiergarten. The building combines the Residence at the top floor with the Chancery in the floors beneath.
The Embassy has hired the services of an expert building consultant that will advise it all the way from the negotiations with the bidders until the conclusion of the building project. HPP International Planungsgesellschaft mbH with main headquarters in Düsseldorf, Germany is the Embassy’s consultant. HPP has worked with many German institutions, including the Federal Foreign Office.
HPP is one of Germany’s leading architectural partnerships with 80 years of experience in producing buildings of every type and size in Germany and abroad. HPP constructed or advised the German government in the construction of its Embassies in Kiev, Bucharest, Warsaw and Kabul, and the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government in Berlin. It was also commissioned for the expansion of the Embassy of Japan in Berlin. HPP’s achievements can be seen at their website www.hpp.com.
Groth Gruppe has 30 years of experience in the industry, and it has constructed in Berlin the Mexican and Malaysian Embassies, as well as buildings for the Embassies of Luxemburg, Bahrain, Malta and Monaco. Within the Köbis-Triangle where the prospective site of the Philippine Embassy is envisioned, Groth Gruppe was responsible for several representative buildings including Konrad Adenauer Foundation building, and is now building the “Heydt Eins” high-end residential project which will rise beside the prospective site.
Other important buildings of Groth Gruppe in Berlin are the CDU Headquarters, and the building for the “House of German Business” which has the offices of the interest groups DIHK, the BDI and the BDA. One can appreciate Groth Gruppe’s past and present projects through its website www.grothgruppe.de.
The Embassy has been renting portions of a business building at Berlin-Wilmersdorf for its Chancery since it moved from Bonn to Berlin in 1999. If the building project pushes through with a contract signing in the first quarter of 2014, construction will be concluded by 2016 and the Philippines can finally boast of its own Embassy building in the European capital where Dr. José P. Rizal first published his Noli Me Tangere over a century ago. END
