85 London Wall, EC2 is designed by the 30 Casson Conder Partnership, 1990. It is a pleasant, rather small building (5,085 sq. m. gross) and sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to the size and ‘footprint’ of buildings such as Minster Court, those atBroadgate, orFoster’s ‘gherkin’. It is for the smaller organisation and professional user and was executed in an unfashionably anachronistic manner, employing pre-cast stone and concrete panels in order to achieve a rather collegiate look for this conservation area, as if it really belonged in Oxford or Cambridge. The stone is Portland
1 and Juane limestone.
The building is worth comparing with William Whitfield’s work at I Richmond House or Powell & Moya’s QEII Conference Centre.
This is really a building to see on the inside, but you can get into the building’s public art gallery and gain views through to the inner workings (otherwise try the Open House London weekend event). On the outside it is two buildings: a ‘grand manner’ building from the 1920’s adjacent to a new 17,000 sq. m. commercial office building from Foster’s studio (bizarrely posing as SOM circa 1960 via Ungers), unified by Julian Powell-Tuck’s superb interior work (which includes coloured floor coding which can be seen from the street).
The drama of these interiors stems from Bloomberg’s expressive culture: as if the former market leader (Reuters) woke up one morning to find it was an ad agency on something pharmaceutical. Bloomberg is actually a sophisticated number crunching factory and information service for financial institutions, but it’s all high-energy stuff where staff are well paid, well served and given environments complete with swanky training facilities, a rolling art programme, large exotic aquaria on each floor (one of the largest collections in Europe, needing two full-time marine biologists to look after it), a lobby that doubles as a free cafeteria and more monitor screens than people.
In fact Bloomberg TV is everywhere — including the toilets and inset into cafeteria benches. Take it away and the affective energy level would drop dramatically.
And much of the production takes place in Bloomberg’s basement studios whose informality and economy is guaranteed to send shock waves through some media visitors. The cleverness resides in the fact that the TV epitomises everything that Bloomberg is and thereby becomes a celebratory device that permeates the entire ambience of the place. It is not every culture or architectural project that allows the designer to reach through to the heart of a culture and manifest it in such a fun and dramatic manner. Oddly enough, it is not intrusive — it’s wall-paper.
What strikes one about Tuck’s work is that he has managed to realise something ‘authentic’: a one- to-one match between culture and design. It might not be the BBC (who, on the visits I have made with them, are stunned by the economy of the production facilities), Reuters or any ad agency one can think of, and it might not be a culture or design to your liking (this is the raw end of capitalism), but the authenticity of the design sings through and commands one’s respect. And the more one thinks about that point, the more one becomes curious about what ‘good’ design really is. Without good styling, the realised design won’t command respect; but the presence of good styling alone will not achieve this — something more is needed. Perhaps that something is a note of self-celebration. But what is this when it is not Sartre’s ‘bad faith’? This is easily recognisable, if only intuitively: that ‘dung’ note which suggests something is not right, that one is experiencing a pretence. . . On the other hand, such an impoverishment may be the authentic nature of some cultures. But to expressively grasp the essence of a culture and to be able to manifest this as an intrinsic part of a commodious design — that’s arguably quite clever.