This is a bit of a beast, reminiscent of Denis Lasdun’s effort just north of the Barbican (Milton Gate) i. e. its all glass — plus decorative stone fins (the planners insist on stone). But it is not unattractive, has a splendid upper level garden terrace, enjoys superb views and is extremely well detailed. In brief, the building replaces Plantation House — a scene of trading in exotic goods for generations — and the challenge to its designers was to articulate a massive bulk as a series of discrete parts. They strive to do this vertically in a familiar divide between the lower and upper parts — the latter all glass; the former decorated with stone fins. They also divide the urban block between north and south parts, with an alley in between (where we find an art installation called ‘Time & Tide’, by Simon Patterson and featuring pictures of the Moon’s surface). But it is the southern facades that are by far the most intriguing and successful (those belonging to Plantation Place South; 14,215 sq. m. net) in their striving to express a more tectonic kind of facade. It then becomes all the more regrettable that, immediately one leaves the street, the facades reduce to something comparatively cheap ‘n’ cheerful. This might accord with a long City tradition of how to treat the alleys and backlands but it doesn’t help such places become more important and it is a distinct betrayal of modernist ideals that had aspired toward a different set of values — compare this, for example, with the work of Hopkins at Bracken House. Also compare with the work of this same practice at Broadgate, where the strategy of stone on the lower facades and a breakout to aluminium and glass on the upper parts (now commonplace) was first explored (as a variation on the podium and tower theme).
It is well worth exploring the many alleys around here — a backlands that reveals a surprising degree of neglected potential within the City. The above is on a route from Bank to Leadenhall Market. It includes leftover reminders of a once rich cultural history that has now disappeared and been replaced by a blue plaque and a security camera. That such a potential is not exploited is, in part, because the City has no interest in tourists or residents – the very people who might enrich its monoculture. The reasons are simple: tourists get in the way, as do residential leases which prevent rapid change.
18 Minster Court (Mincing Lane, EC3; GMW 1991;
18 tube: Tower Hill): the three buildings of this 59,000 sq. m. complex (the ‘London Underwriting Centre’) form a ‘groundscraper’: low and flat, filling the urban block and respecting street lines. Targeted at the insurance market (Lloyd’s is around the corner), it’s also an idiosyncratic re-creation of those C19th battles between the Classical and Gothic traditions – this time complete with neo-Gothic entry court pillars straight off the CAD screen (‘wirefame’ representations that will surely date the building precisely to any future archaeologist) and three horses of the Apocalypse straight from the early 1980’s London exhibition of the horses from St. Mark’s Square in Venice. The forecourt with its large glazed roof and in between spaces are described as ‘public’. They’re not, and are gated off at weekends. Beyond them are bars and restaurants. One’s principal complaint has to be that the theatre doesn’t go far enough. The piers and arches, for example, are disturbingly non-structural and one longs for a Michael Hopkins version of the same game (it would be real!). However, behind the fagade games, the three blocks of offices conform to what has been the accepted convention for office design for some time: access floors, suspended ceilings, 1.5m interior planning grids, etc. The fagade itself conforms to another fashionable convention of the 1980’s: granite cladding, a symbol of robustness and durability, superseded in the 1990’s by a softer fashion for limestone.
This building is worth comparing with other GMW City architecture over the years: the elegant Commercial Union building opposite Lloyd’s, the former Banque Belge building (the low block on the corner), the former Barclays Bank HQ on Gracechurch Street (a most peculiar, bombastic mix of Otto Wagner, Terry Farrell and Jim Stirling), and the new lobby to the NatWest Tower. These buildings provide a unique record of changing architectural fashions within one practice.
1Q The Institute of Chartered Accountants is a building to be read in three stages. The first was a much – 19 praised building designed by John Belcher (1889 – 83), in Great Swan Alley, EC2, north of Bank. Forty years later and in another era his ageing partner, Joass, added an eastern extension – exactly like Belcher’s earlier work. Another 35 years later William Whitfield (master planner of Paternoster Square) came along to make major additions. Rather incongruously, he again extended the Belcher and Joass fagade in the original manner, turned a corner and added a lively baroque door feature which appears to say: “There you are Mr. Belcher: I can also do it as well as you, in your language." And then, in the same breath, he switches to the current ‘served & servant’ Modernism of the late 1960’s: expressed functional elements differentiated from the office floors, Brutalist concrete, large areas of glass, etc. Few buildings exhibit such a skilful architectural gamesmanship (but see Horace Jones at Leadenhall). It’s a rare and artful, old fashioned skill (similar but not the same as the self-conscious display of mannered gamesmanship exercised by Venturi at the Sainsbury Wing) that can be a source of joy to practice and experience.
Absence of such an ingredient to practice arguably empties it of irony and extracts joy from its seriousness.
Lloyd’s Register may have been completed fourteen years after its much more expensive relation, the Lloyd’s ‘86 building, but it shares many of the basic features and details, as 88 Wood Street and K2, two other buildings by the practice in the City area. Also see the Broadwick Street building and Channel Four.
At a plot ratio of 8:1 overall and 11:1 (build area to site area) for the new build parts, the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping building is a dense piece of development, squeezed into the site of existing premises like jam injected into the heart of a donut. The building is large and the design is clever: a professional achievement that simultaneously satisfies the requirements of City planners, the client and the passer-by in the street. Lloyd’s wanted lots of space. The planners wanted old buildings and facades retained. And, as passers-by, we all want something to engage and enjoy. This design certainly does that. Old and new are married together in a complex manner that — as with all good design — appears effortless and, as a solution, self-evident. Which, of course, it isn’t. As at Wood Street (same Director in charge) the conservative street experience belies a much more robust and bloody-minded reality deeper within the site. But the architects have achieved this magnitude of building and high density with a sensitivity to scale.
This is especially evident in the entry court — a former churchyard: tight, cramped, over-powered by soaring glass lifts that silently glide up the side of the building. . . and yet it is comfortable and pleasant — in fact, a refreshing experience.
The Register goes back to 1689, sharing common roots with Lloyd’s insurers (for whom, Rogers did the ‘86 building). However, the Register established its own identity in the late C18 and by 1901 it had its own building, designed by T. E Collcutt (described as ‘arts & crafts baroque’). Lloyd’s later expanded into nearby buildings and, in the 1920’s acquired and demolished the church of St. Katherine Coleman, building more accommodation. And they kept on growing. In 1993 Lloyd’s intended to move its 1300 staff out of the City, but this failed to come to fruition and it was decided to remain in the City, rebuilding on the existing site with a brief for a 24,000 sq. m. (net area) building, a minimum net/gross ratio of 70% (actually quite generous, but reflecting the site difficulties), a high plot ratio (which, as built, is 8:1 overall and 11:1 for the new parts), and the potential for a significant amount of sub-letting (which has turned out to be about 50%). To which the Rogers’ team added an energy-efficient element.
The Collcutt building is the one that sits on the corner of Fenchurch Street and Lloyd’s Avenue, and which has been so cleverly integrated into the new facilities designed by a team led by Graham Stirk (as for88 Wood Street) so that the better parts of the old building have been retained. Apart from integrating new and old in this manner, the design strategy is similar to that of the Lloyd’s ‘86 building and 88 Wood Street: an 80:20 equation as managers say, in which most of the accommodation is simple and rational, whilst the remaining part is complex. For example, the principal part of the accommodation is a series of ‘wedges’, two of which rise to 14 stories; the remainder is in the refurbished old buildings (which included adding another storey to the Grade II Listed Collcutt building).
On Fenchurch Street, between the East India Arms on one corner and the Collcutt building on the other, sits a building that the architects and their client intended
to demolish and replace with a glass pavilion. But the planners refused. And they were right, because it is the contrasts that make this overall configuration work so well. The ‘wedges’ are nominally 9m wide (but tapered) with atria in between. However these intermediate atria are not consistent divisions and the planning results in some very deep floor plates at the lower levels. The key point to be made is that these structures attempt to be as rational and consistent as possible, whilst finding discrete points at which they knit together with existing buildings and similar site constraints.
The structure is mostly precast concrete with some elements poured on site to form a composite structure. Wherever possible, this is exposed so that it can play a role in providing thermal inertia. This allows night-time cooling and so reduces the peak heat gain / cooling issue during office hours (when computers and lights are heating the place up). These spaces are serviced by a deep plenum computer floor — into which fresh air is pumped — and by a ceiling level light beam / chilled beam fitting that obviates the need for the dreaded suspended ceiling. It also means the architects could provide a coved section to the ceiling soffit (to reflect light). As with 88 Wood Street the new parts have floor to ceiling glazing, providing excellent views and lots of daylight obviated when necessary by external, motorised louvres. Each cladding element is 3m. x 3.250m; there is an inner sheet of laminated glass plus an outer one of solar protective glass; the assembly is shaded by motorised, perforated aluminium louvres. These louvres are tracked, so they can be slid sideways to clean the window glass. The external lift cores are supported on steel frames and clad in glass — and it is these features that enliven and articulate the building.
ni It is on a triangular site at the east end of 21 Fenchurch Street, EC3, confronting car drivers arriving into the City from the east, that Terry Farrell offers us a solution to the corner problem to be read as a set of interpenetrating bodies, a kind of metaphorical architectural ‘hinge’ (1987). The building is an avowedly Post-Modern composition, together with a strong, implied classical arrangement of base, giant order, cornice and attic storey. The cramped entrance lobby around the side, on Leadenhall Street, struggles to offer us an impressive experience but, overall, the building is so much better I than other, contemporaneous і offerings from the Po-Mo ■lobby. (Whatever did happen to all that Po-Mo and Hi-tech stuff people got so excited about in the ‘80’s and was so effortlessly absorbed by ■ the beast of the metropolis.) Compare it with Stirling & Wilford’s later design at Bank.
9 n The Port of London Authority at 10 2 2 Trinity Square, EC3 was designed by Sir Edwin Cooper (1912, architect of the first Lloyd’s building). His baroque wedding cake, designed as the managerial home of the PLA, stands high and proud, looking over the former, busy but troubled dock areas, as if its imperialist bombast might bear upon the workers even as its massing proudly welcomed ships into the Pool of London beneath the Tower of London. Neptune looks down upon the scene from his niche on high and the street level offers ‘grand manner’ gestures that are attractively urbane in scale. A touch of that imperialist bombast still exists on an upper level in this building; a suite of ornate executive dining and meeting rooms which remind one of how some people lived in the City until comparatively recently.
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The atrium’s wall of glass stops about 3-4m above the paving, producing a sheltered but still outdoor area. |