Summary
The view from the top of business. Presented by Evan Davis, The Bottom Line cuts through confusion, statistics and spin to present a clearer view of the business world, through discussion with people running leading and emerging companies.
With so many people now living in high-consuming industrial nations, and with many commodity prices increasing, Evan asks his business guests how they plan to economise in their use of raw materials. They also discuss building design and appraise the importance of form and function.
Evan is joined in the studio by Eugene Kohn, co-founder and chairman of architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates; Mark Price, managing director of supermarket chain Waitrose; Andy Bond, former chief executive and chairman of Asda.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading the Bottom Line podcast. |
| 0:02.7 | In this week's programme, Evan Davis asks his panel of top executives about raw materials and building design. |
| 0:10.6 | Hello and welcome to the bottom line and welcome to the era of expensive raw materials. |
| 0:17.6 | With so many people now living in high-consuming industrial nations, the upward trend |
| 0:22.8 | in commodity prices of recent years is surely more than a mere blip. Well, I'll ask my business guests |
| 0:29.2 | today how they plan to economize in their use of materials and some thoughts from them too |
| 0:35.1 | about buildings that work for those at work. |
| 0:39.0 | But first of all, let's spend a few minutes meeting my guests. |
| 0:42.7 | And first up, I'm very excited to say we have architect Gene Cohn with us, |
| 0:46.8 | founder and chairman of the US firm Cone Pedersen Fox Associates. |
| 0:51.5 | We're going to talk more about your projects a bit later, Gene, |
| 0:55.0 | but just so people know what the company does. I mean, give us some examples of your work. |
| 0:59.6 | Some of the projects, particularly locally here in London, that are, I think, well known, |
| 1:03.6 | would be the Heron Tower, just completed. The pinnacle or helter-skelter, as it once was called, |
| 1:09.3 | is under construction. Be completed in about two, two and a half years, we hope. |
| 1:13.8 | We've done other buildings like Thames Court here in London, |
| 1:16.6 | and the Unilever headquarters, which is a spectacular building. |
| 1:20.0 | It was a redo, and from a sustainability point of view, an excellent way to build |
| 1:24.4 | by taking existing building and redoing it, making it special. And then across the |
| 1:29.5 | globe in Shanghai, very famous building called the Shanghai World Financial Center, which is super |
| 1:35.1 | tall, about 1,612 feet, to be exact. It's not all tall buildings, though, is it? You do some short |
| 1:41.0 | ones as well. Oh, we do some short. We're doing the Abu Dhabi Airport. We did the World Bank headquarters in Washington, which is... Okay, enough already. We're going to come back to your |
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