Naturgy opens headquarters on Diagonal

Naturgy has moved its Barcelona offices to Avenida Diagonal, 525, in a 9-story building with a usable area of 5,200 square meters, to which two basement floors and two outdoor terraces are added. The gas group has leased the property for an initial period of ten years to Colonial, which has carried out a thorough rehabilitation and modernization of the building to adapt it to the highest standards of eco-efficiency and sustainability. Externally, the most significant change is the complete renovation of the glass facade.

Narturgy's corporate services in Barcelona ---the group also has a headquarters in Madrid--- will no longer be in Barceloneta, in the impressive Torre Marenostrum building, designed by architects Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue, opened in 2006. Before, for more than a century, the headquarters of the former Gas Natural had been in the Portal de l'Àngel, in a historic building now partially occupied by an H&M store.

The Barceloneta complex is actually made up of three buildings, but Naturgy is currently only the owner of one of these three properties, the smallest one. The other two ---the one-hundred-meter-high, twenty-story tower, and a horizontal building known as the aircraft carrier--- are entirely owned by Colonial since 2019. Naturgy and its subsidiary Nedgia will continue to occupy that smaller property, so the group does not completely abandon Barceloneta, an iconic place for the company, as it was where the former Societat Catalana per l'Enllumenat per Gas was born in 1842, a company that, over the years, successively transformed into Catalana de Gas y Electricidad (1912), Gas Natural (1991) and Naturgy (2018).

The new Diagonal headquarters had housed the headquarters of the Department of Environment during Jordi Pujol's governments and, after the disappearance of this ministry, housed the Secretariat of Environment and Sustainability, dependent on the Department of Territory. In 2014, the Generalitat, then presided over by Artur Mas, sold the building to the Ayuso family, former owner of Merquinsa, for 16.4 million euros, at a time when other public buildings were also sold. Four years later, in 2018, Colonial announced the purchase of the building and an investment of 37 million euros that included both the acquisition price and the budget for the now completed rehabilitation.

The renovation has been carried out after the termination of the rental contract held by Medi Ambient, which has, in turn, moved to the building occupied by the Agència Catalana de l'Aigua (ACA) on Provença street, 204. The ACA, for its part, has relocated to a property it owns at Provença, 260, which has also been recently remodeled.

According to Naturgy, the move to Diagonal "symbolizes the company's transformation, with new, more sustainable, flexible, and collaborative work environments." "It is not a simple change of location. It is part of the transformation we are immersed in and which also has to do with spaces. In the offices, we create our Naturgy culture day by day, which is why we have designed a work environment that enhances the connection of talent and teamwork, and where digitalization allows us to reorient our processes in a more agile, simple, and efficient way," argued the president of Naturgy, Francisco Reynés, to justify the change.

The new offices are designed in an open-space modality, meaning without private offices, and are equipped with all technological advances to minimize paper use and employee mobility. The design of the south facade incorporates a treatment of photovoltaic louvers, which, in addition to protecting from the sun in the warmer months of the year, generate clean energy for a part of its electricity consumption. A large part of the building's roof is designed as a natural green space, incorporating native plant species with low consumption, which help minimize environmental impact and provide extra insulation to the building.