This — the first of Nicholas Grimshaw’s efforts in the City — may be one of its better office buildings. The plan (1000 sqm.) is simple enough, but it splits the core in order to make arrival and internal movements a dramatic event by locating the lifts at the very front of the building. This […]
Category: Londos’s Contemporary Architecture
Alban Gate: strange twins at the portal
The developer for Alban Gate argued that replacing a 1960’s shoe-box office tower (Lee House) was not feasible unless the new building could be much larger. Farrell’s idea was to acrobatically use air-rights over London Wall and provide two linked towers totalling 35,000 sq. m. of office space for multiple lettings, all within the planner’s […]
Wood Street Group: haunted modernism
It is commonplace to note that what was once radical becomes, with hindsight, considerably less so and more deeply embedded in history than we had initially thought. For example, the ‘86 Lloyd’s building, when looked at closely, becomes an exercise in continuity; history and context assert themselves. It’s a theme Peter Ackroyd takes up in […]
The City Milton Gate
Like the National Theatre, Milton Gate betrays Denys Lasdun’s fascination with diagonals and castles, as well as a peculiar lack of interest in entrances. Milton Gate is a block-filling, 20,000 sq. m. office building, cut by a diagonal route leading into an inner atrium, the exterior being entirely clad in green, double-walled glazing. It might […]
Winchester House
The rear (Great Winchester Street) fagade makes more of an effort to articulate itself. Internally, Deutsche Bank has a very impressive art collection, starting with the Rosenquist housed in the lobby: ‘The Swimmer in the Econo-mist’. The spaces between the old warehouses (from 34 the mid C18th) and the new, rather ordinary modernist office buildings […]