Exchange was, until recently,
another exercise in cultural continuity masking architectural differences. The first Royal Exchange was founded as a place of international commerce and built 1566. It burned down in the Great Fire of 1666 and was then rebuilt, only to be burned down again in the 1830’s. Each architectural exercise provided the same fundamental configuration of accommodation around a central court where people could meet. The original building had an arcaded court and the present building of 1841 – 44, by Sir William Tite has a central court that was covered over when the building was refurbished by Fitzroy Robinson in 1990. It was then converted again (2002) into a smart, European style court of expensive shops — in a sense returning the space back to its original intentions as a trading place (even if this is at a rather less strategic and more frivolous level).
5 Edwin Lutyens was one of Britain’s most
acclaimed architects up to his death in 1944. This bank HQ he designed for Midland Bank (1924 – 39) and is a good example of the old man cheerfully fronting (literally and metaphorically) a design executed (millennium style) by others. Somehow, an irascible character comes through: look at the detailing and the Lutyens-designed little boy with goose. Try entering the bank hall from the side and leaving through the opposite side, attempting to deny the latterday tat that promotes financial services and the like — the old hall and all its pretensions is still there, not yet a cafe or bar. Also see Lutyens’ Brittanic House building (1921 – 5) in Finsbury Square.
6 St. Mary Woolnoth (1716 – 27), at Bank, is
especially noteworthy among the works of a man (Nicholas Hawksmoor) who served for a long time under Wren and finally came into his own relatively late in life. Despite its difficult site, the architectural elements are almost abstractly simple, underscoring the symbolic geometries that once had so much significance and embodying the C18 sense of the Sublime as something at once wonderful, awesome and terrible.
It seems appropriate that this building should sit near to Stirling’s No.1 Poultry. It is one of six churches by this architect: also see St. George Bloomsbury
(just south of the British Museum); St. George-in – the-East, Wapping; St.
Alphege, Greenwich; St.
Anne, Limehouse; and, especially, Christ Church,
Spitalfields. Also take time to compare this church with the Stirling Wilford building opposite — a distinct note of commonality crosses the centuries.
No. 1 Poultry le coq on Poultry
Stirling & Wilford’s design for No.1 Poultry began in 1985. By its completion in 1998 it was stylistically anachronistic: a strident post-modern building that might have been more appropriately completed ten years earlier. But that doesn’t make it a bad design, or uninteresting.
The building’s developer, Lord Palumbo, is also a major figure in arts funding. His father began considering redevelopment of this difficult triangular site and its 1890, neo-Gothic buildings designed by John Belcher with a scheme drawn up by the late Mies van der Rohe in the mid-1960’s (Mies died in 1969). The initiative proposed demolishing the existing set of rather small and well-formed buildings, aggregating the sites and replacing them with a large piazza and shoe-box tower — a not uncommon City development pattern, which drew the criticism from Prince Charles that the proposed building was a ‘glass stump’. Controversy followed. Alternatives were put forward (notably by conservative interests and (the now Sir Terry Farrell), and Palumbo jnr. turned to Stirling and Wilford for another proposal – a stunning design that eventually won planning permission (this took place just after Stirling and Wilford’s Staatsgalerie had opened in Stuttgart). And then Stirling died having a minor hernia operation.
No. 1 Poultry is deliberately designed as a symmetrical, axial scheme whose flamboyant mannerisms are argued to contextually relate to its neighbours (Lutyens, Soane, Hawksmoor, Tite, Wren). Shops are on the ground floor and a mall at basement level links through to Bank station, the Tube and the DLR. The top level houses a Terence Conran terrace restaurant (Coq d’Argent) with terrace landscaping by Arabella Lennox – Boyd. In between are five floors of speculative office space. All this is organised around a central, open court (formally massed as a rotunda) which also allows the public to pass through the heart of the building and down to a lower level concourse connected to the Underground.
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The Monument on King William Street, EC3 commemorates the Great Fire of London, 1666, and is designed by Christopher Wren and RobertHooke (1671 – 6). We no longer create such monumental civic obelisks inspired by the example of the Ancients in order to commemorate important contemporary events (perhaps Newcastle’s ‘Angel of the North’ is an exception?) and one half expects to find a commercial sponsor’s plaque at the base. The column used to greet visitors from the south until London Bridge was realigned and is worth a visit in order to experience I its peculiarity and scale at ground level, and to enjoy the view of the City from the top. Also try St Paul’s, Tower 42, the ‘Gherkin’, Tower and Bridge, as well as the terrace restaurant at No.1 Poultry.
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The No.1 Poultry design bears within it the memory of both what was on the site previously and the original ideas of 1986, which sliced the site into four disparate parts, including the retention of the John Belcher corner building. This evolved into an A-B-A rhythm flanked by a western service end and a new eastern prow bearing elements of Belcher’s design (including the clock and a salvaged terracotta frieze of 1875 by Joseph Kremer on the Poultry side). However, one difficulty with such architectural games is that they are front-end biased (toward the sensitivities of planners) and the experience depends entirely upon memory — and who can remember a building once it has been demolished? This means that — whatever the ostensible intent — Stirling’s corner feature has to sustain itself on its own merits. The central element (B’ above) is a light-well and public right of way — don’t let the security guards tell you it isn’t when you get your camera out!
The prominent corner turret looking toward Bank (which some critics with more erudition than common sense argue it to be a roguish quotation of a celebratory Roman rostral column!) is a satisfyingly strong piece of architectural gamesmanship formally reminiscent of what was there before. But if we can never remember what was there before, the gesture loses its meaning.
In any case, such theatricality is a reminder of how, in other hands, a marriage between the developer’s vanity and ‘80’s Post-Modernism could produce rather peculiar designs. The building also appears to lack those elements of surprise and invention that made Stirling’s earlier work so intriguing, as well as the deftness and humour one associates with this distinctly idiosyncratic architect – that witty irreverence lifting his work above the mainstream. Bemusement at the design’s outmoded idiosyncracity had the media reporting that the building was designed in a spirit of derivative homage by a Stirling associate rather than the man himself. (But what is unusual in that? It was, in any case, posthumously completed by Michael Wilford & Associates, now also a closed practice. Such is the secret history of buildings, a clouded oral narrative which buildings themselves do little to elucidate.
The building joins the company of Lutyens’ Midland Bank, Soane’s Bank of England screen wall, Dance’s Mansion House, Wren’s St. Stephen Walbrook and Hawksmoor’s rusticated facade of St. Mary Woolnoth as a notable architectural exercise at this most significant corner of the City. However, No.1 suffered the difficulty of completion after the recession of 1990 to 1994, an interlude engendering a massive redefinition of architectural fashions whose most notable feature was the termination of 15 years of architectural Post-Modernism and its overnight replacement by a revived, less baroque and theatrical Modernism (actually, more truly postmodern!), more likely to be inspired by work in Barcelona than Chicago. (Although, ironically, Mies is back in fashion! See the Foster building on Gresham Street). However, times change and in a few years this strong design might become respected for what it is, rather than disparaged for being merely outmoded.
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This (the Former Barclays Bank HQ,
GMW, 1994) has to be one of the least distinguished buildings in the City — a PostModern design completed in 1994 when everyone (including developers) had gone somewhere else. But it’s interesting and is by GMW, who have so many buildings in the City. The peculiarities of this headquarters building includes references to Stirling (the neo-Egyptian cornice, from his Stuttgart Gallery), to Otto Wagner (the late C19 Viennese gold decorations on the cornice), and to Rogers (the Lloyd’s atrium top). But see it in context, not just with the other buildings in the adjacent alleys, but in terms of GMW’s City output that includes the former Banque Belge, the Commercial Union and the ground level lobby of Tower 42.
1Л The former Banque Belge, GMW, 1975 is on the 10 corner of Bishopsgate and Leadenhall EC. It is a very elegant attempt to make the bottom / middle / top equation work in the Georgian manner: almost entirely with well considered geometrical proportions. But perhaps it should be much taller – in which case it might have put the Commercial Union to shame. The entrance canopy on Leadenhall is a later addition of about 1999. Compare it with that building, with the rather bizarre, neo-Gothic Minster Court, the Barclays Bank HQ on the corner of Lombard and Gracechurch (1994), and the base of Tower 42 — all of them by GMW. That collection makes a fascinating history of changing architectural fashions as well as a record of a changing City.
11 The Lloyd’s ’86 Building: an exercise in continuity
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Photo: Nick Cooney |
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Lloyd’s seen from inside the upper part of 30 St. Mary Axe (the ‘Gherkin’.) |
The now ageing, 47,000 sq. m. Lloyd’s 1986 Building is established as a Modernist icon and has become an accepted part of the City fabric, even if it is now overtaken in the glamour stakes by newer neighbours such as Foster’s St. Mary Axe building (the ‘Erotic Gherkin’), Rogers’ own Lloyds Register around the corner, and suffering a degree of internal abuse. As a design, the building makes little sense located outside the context of the client’s status and history: one of the most prestigious, respectable, and long-established institutions within the secretive world of the Square Mile, an insurance market where so-called ‘Names’ gamble their wealth against the possible misfortune of others through the medium of insurance underwriters and brokers. It was after one of the worst periods of such misfortune and the beginning of a new mass market for insurance that Lloyds found itself needing and able to move itself from premises in the Royal Exchange to a new, custom-designed building in
Leadenhall Street. That was in 1923 and the completed ‘1928 Building’ was designed by Sir Edwin Cooper (1873 – 1942). The fundamental organisation of this building (a large and high trading floor, with a formal entrance used by few and a secondary entrance used by most people, with cores at the corners) was followed through in each of the subsequent buildings Lloyd’s constructed, including the Rogers’ design.
The ‘grand manner’ Portland stone entrance portico in Cornhill is now all that remains of the 1928 Building. From its entrance vestibule a passage led to a palatial, square, double-height hall, 1500 sq. m. in size, lit by a central roof light and huge, suspended light fittings, and dressed in Subiaco marble. At its centre was the ‘caller’s rostrum’ and the famous Lutine Bell: rung, by tradition, whenever a ship was sunk. A secondary underwriter’s entrance in Lime Street served as a kind of rear door to the Room (as the market hall was called).
Within eight years of moving into the 1928 Building Lloyd’s was expanding into an adjacent building and, after WWII, business had grown to such an extent that a gallery was considered for the Room. However, this proposal was superseded by a scheme to completely rebuild the adjacent building according to the designs of Terence Heysham (1897 – 1967): what was to become the ‘58 Building’.
Like its predecessor, the 1958 Building was fundamentally a tall, marbled, top-lit space complete with an array of hanging light fittings; upper floors were for support staff. Lloyd’s had been able to expand horizontally, stretching the Room into the largest air – conditioned volume in Europe. They were also able to provide a gallery (for the relatively newer, non-marine insurance markets, such as cars and aviation), to bring along the rostrum for the Lutine Bell, and also the timber linings and plasterwork of a 1763 country estate dining room designed by Robert Adam – which became the linings of the ‘Adam Committee Room’ in a new Committee Suite. The underwriting space was now about 4100 sq. m.
By the early 1970’s the need for additional accommodation had returned and the Lloyd’s Committee initiated a search for architects who might design a building to last, not 25 years again, but 125 years! The outcome was a Richard Rogers Partnership design for the site of Cooper’s building, a scheme which allowed Lloyds to retain the 1958 Building for support staff (later converted by DEGW, who added two large and separate basement food courts — for the underwriters and the Lloyd’s staff. By late 2002 this building was scheduled for demolition).
Like its predecessors, the 1986 Building – as it became known – is all about the Room. Recreating it on the 1928 Building’s site meant that expansion had to be vertical rather than horizontal. The single gallery Heysham designed now became five galleries of insurance market. The roof lights of the 1928 and 1958 Buildings now became a cathedral-like atrium. The marble was reinvented as high specification concrete and the circular, hanging light fittings as sophisticated, specialist-designed, fittings ubiquitously provided for all interior spaces: Room, galleries, offices and even the Chairman’s suite on the upper floor. In the latter, the Adam Room was recreated in all its wondrous and incongruous glory as a classical building accommodated within the Rogers’ edifice – an odd Post-Modern note in an otherwise radically Hi-tech design.
The most controversial aspect of the architecture is undoubtedly the decision to locate all services on the exterior. This daring rationale ostensibly derived from the need to keep the market floors entirely clear of intrusions and has been hailed as both romantic (akin to Gothic cathedrals) and truly modern (one of the most advanced technological edifices in the western world). However, debate concerned with the merits and demerits of oil rig aesthetics has carried another sub-text. The cultural values of Lloyd’s, as a rapacious, capitalist City institution with deeply conservative instincts (after moving into the 1986 Building they retained the basement of the 1958 Building as a practice shooting range), proved, in the long run, to be profoundly at odds with those of its left-wing, egalitarian architects fresh from completion of a grand projet in Paris.
The project’s history saw an apparent exemplar of designer-client relations become an adversarial battle between modernist architects and their more reactionary, public school clients – particularly when it got down to who sat (more advantageously) where and on what within the stacked trading galleries. Discontent became rife, focusing on all kinds of design issues.
Problems included a bright blue carpet which was replaced by a biscuit-coloured pattern worthy of a tawdry provincial office; a special design (by Eva Jiricna) for the ‘boxes’ at which the underwriters sat – diluted to accord with demands they should be just like the old, teak and uncomfortable boxes
of the 1958 Building; window ‘sails’ designed by Jiricna for the Captain’s Dining Room (the Underwriter’s formal dining space) – unceremoniously removed whilst her granite floor was covered by more tawdry carpet.
In the background were political and financial difficulties threatening the future of the market and parallelling the last years of building completion. These continued and, by 1994, the building had been sold to a German developer – an act soon to be followed by a massive financial claim against the Rogers’ Partnership for problems with the external pipework and the sale of the ‘58 building (now demolished and being replaced by, you guessed it, another Foster team design). A common denominator between designer and client, one concerning a love of risk, daring and an ambition to make public statements had not overcome cultural disparities and the misfortunes of fate. Will the building last or slowly deteriorate, possibly to be replaced by something more economic?
Compare with other nearby Rogers’ designs:
K2 (at St. Katherine’s Dock), 100Wood Street, and Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. Also compare with the first significant office building after Lloyd’s — Channer Four and the building in Soho, at Broadwick Street.
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Right: Jones’ exercise in stretching the fagade to places where it becomes pure theatre. |
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і л Leadenhall Market (Horace Jones, 1881), on 12 the east side of Lloyds, stands as the masterful reinvention of a poultry market which has been here since the C14. Jones (1819 – 97) quietly exhibits a fine architectural gamesmanship which establishes the potential of the heartland of the City’s urban blocks. For example, the ostensible formal geometry of the scheme is anything but that in reality and Jones cleverly insinuates his big idea into the surrounding fabric with a series of local and contingent moves. Examine the manner in which he (joyfully?) extends southward from the central crossing, reaching out architectural tentacles, pushing the facade concept as far as it will go — even where there is no building behind because of ‘rights of light’ issues — in an effort to reach out to the surrounding streets that define the urban block. There is an urbanity here that perhaps awaits the socio-economic conditions that will bring the market back to life outside of a narrowly defined lunch-time trade to City workers. Remove the parking and get a farmers’ market in here? As an example of good backlands utilisation, Leadenhall and similar places (such as Bow Lane) implicitly offer a severe criticism of City redevelopment patterns that pool sites in favour of ever larger buildings and denude formerly rich backland places of their vibrancy. You can walk from here westward through a series of alleys to Bank, passing bland walls of white ceramic brickwork (to reflect daylight) and circular plaques that remind one there was once a pub or coffee house on this site. However, on the way you will also touch upon areas such as that behind St. Peter’s church, where this same vibrancy and a mix of building scales is still (just) maintained, indicating what is still possible. These examples are severe criticism of the Planners’ ‘50’s and ‘60’s enthusiasm for decks and bridges (as at the Barbican), and for monsters such as Broadgate, Spitalfields and Canary Wharf, all of which deny organic change (both as intention and future possibility). |
1 о The Commercial Union building (GMW 13 1969), is a classic example of the post-war,
North American tower-and-piazza equation that makes a comparison with a later generation’s values across the road at Lloyds as well as with the likes of (less well designed) 1960’s City towers that lined London Wall. It’s an elegant building that was sympathetically but entirely reclad after the IRA bomb that went off at the nearby Baltic Exchange in early April 1993 (the bomb that prompted a rebuilding resulting in Foster’s ‘erotic gherkin’).
The major criticism is the usual one for such an architectural equation: the piazza is not entirely unpleasant, but remains a rather inhospitable place.
1 л Like its contemporary neighbour (the lower,
14 former P&O Building to the immediate west, now sporting a cheerful 1998 piazza entrance canopy lit by fibre-optics) the CU once had one of those 1st floor decks (‘pedways’) beloved of the LCC’s ‘50’s and ‘60’s planners, waiting to link into a spreading City network that, in 1965 was planned to be 35m in extent. Go around the corner to Leadenhall St. and you will see this dream literally come to an abrupt halt up against a 1929 Midland Bank by Lutyens, manifesting the presumption that the bridge would naturally leap from the former P&O building across the gap and that Lutyens’
‘grand manner’ bank would, in time, fall down before its utterly inevitable progress.
The largest example of this dream is, of course, the Barbican. Other parts of the pedway system still remain (e. g. just south of Broadgate).
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Above: View to the entrance. |
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30 St. Mary Axe: enigmatic exotica |
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30 St. Mary Axe, EC3 Foster and Partners, 2003 Tube: Monument, Bank |
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Above: the adjacent church of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, a nun’s church dating from 1200, recently renovated by Quinlan Terry. Below: the ground floor plan of 30 St Mary Axe. |
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In 2003 the City finally got a building to outpace the Lloyd’s ‘86 building designed by a Richard Rogers team: Foster’s ‘erotic gherkin’ — opposite Lloyds and adjacent to GMW’s elegant Commercial Union building (120m), and counterpointing Col. Seifert’s still elegant Tower 42 a few blocks away (183m; formerly the NatWest Tower, the building that has dominated the City skyline since 1981). Whilst the overwhelming reality of the 180m high, 40 storey building (76,400 sq. m.) is its dramatic sculptural form and its dominance of the skyline, a key feature of the building’s internal organisation is its spiralling light-wells that wind around the building and cut across the simple, circular plan providing a perimeter of office ‘fingers’ around a central core — visible from afar as a wrapping, tonal banding to the building’s triangular glazing pattern. The Buckminster-inspired form enjoys all kinds of instrumental rationalisation: it is described as ‘environmentally progressive’, the light-wells allowing light to penetrate and they can ventilate the offices thus reducing air conditioning loads (all assisted by an aerodynamic form that sets up appropriate pressure differentials); the stiff diagrid skin relieves the conventional bracing function of the central core; the glass skin is ventilated; the glazing allows full perimeter views; the tapering geometry reduces reflections and wind disturbance at ground level — which also benefits from an otherwise enlarged public space on a comparatively tight site (as at the Ark). Like the best of Foster’s work (the design is actually attributed to Ken Shuttleworth, Foster’s partner at the time of the design), the architecture has a self – evident clarity about it. Unfortunately, the diagrid is heavily encased with fire protection and the internal lining is on an orthogonal grid (perhaps, in part, explaining the dark glass). The plan is always shown at the fattest point and the atria are actually very small at the bottom and top. In fact, they disappear altogether in the upper floors. Also, someone somewhere in the design process awoke to the fact that tall, winding atria make good fire chimneys and the Gherkin’s atria only stretch between 2 – 5 floors before being cut off — not quite the original dream. Such pure forms also suffer a difficulty Fuller acknowledged with geodesic domes: how do you get in? He suggested one dives under the perimeter. Here, the Foster team have made a cut-out in the skin, forming a lobby (which bears unexpected references to Alvar Aalto’s work). To top it all, early 2005 saw a few of the windows exploding or falling out! This produced interesting measures at the piazza level, but it is usually deserted anyway (except, that is, for architectural tourists). Nevertheless, despite some gripes, this is a remarkable piece of design. However, there is something you should know: there was once an early ‘90’s IRA bomb that devasted this area. The blast took place in front of the Baltic Exchange — a building fondly preserved by |
the conservation lobby. But it was so badly damaged that there was no choice but to demolish it, placing its splendid central market room into wooden crates. The intention was that any new building on the site would have to include this room. Clearly, the proposal was a developer’s nightmare. But the City planners were clever: they negotiated the constraint by agreeing with the site owners for an example of architectural design that was so excellent no one could object to it not including the old parts of the Baltic Exchange. Hence Foster and the Gherkin.
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However, none of this explains the strange attraction / aversion the Gherkin evinces. Its rocketshaped form has a brooding, enigmatic quality and when the building opened for the Open House London event in 2004 there was a five hour wait in a queue that was over 1km long. Most people simply wanted to get to the top, to an amazing double height glass room with incredible views. But it is externally that the building — sitting back within its security zone of open piazza area — serves the metropolis as some equivalent to the Roman ceremonial columns, to obelisks and other such devices that range from neolithic standing stones to that thing in Kubrick’s 2001 movie. Such aspects arguably bear more attractiveness than a design which, at the level of tactile habitability, has been considered to be as barren as any other work from the Foster office. Visit it and make up your own mind.
At the time of writing arrangements can be made to visit the building, but only in small groups. But is is not cheap. Note: you can similarly pay to access Lloyds.
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Left: the building in construction. Below: the ground level arcade that extends around the base of the building – a place that should be welcoming and pleasant, but doesn’t quite pass ‘the cappuccino test’ of attractiveness and comfortability. |
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1 * Just north of Lloyds, through an alley off St. I6 Mary Axe, in Bury Street, EC3, sits a remarkable designed by the Dutch architect H. P. Berlage in 1914, by suggesting a full-frontal j the comer where the building |