Parisians are likely to associate the Salvation Army with Le Corbusier and 1920’s Modernism, so it is interesting to find the Army commissioning a new global headquarters on a rather prominent site in central London: within the City, near to St. Paul’s Cathedral and at the entrance to Foster’s Millennium Bridge. In fact the ‘Sally’, as it is colloquially called, has been on this site for well over one hundred years. But time and change have brought changes to the site and dilution to the needs of this Army of salvation which — now married to concepts of hot-desking and new ways of working — has meant a much reduced accommodative requirement. The large building they had occupied for so long was not only too big, but deemed to be inappropriate to an organisation that not only wants to be seen as evangelical and frugal, but also modern. Such were the key words given to their architects, Sheppard Robson.
Given a need to accommodate far fewer people on the site, Sheppard Robson engaged in a development strategy which located a new headquarter building on the site’s most prominent corner and gave the other two-thirds over to a speculative commercial development which, in effect, has paid for the Sally’s new premises.
The volume of the building is equally split between three upper levels of offices and three lower levels of public spaces and facilities. The latter includes a conference suite and restaurant; the former has the usual facilties and – on the building’s principal floor – a suite given over to (and equally divided between) the General of the Army and his Chief of Staff. They, in turn, share offices with their wives (a significant aspect of their role) and are supported by a team of support staff (men, of course). At the heart of this executive suite is a fine chapel that projects out over the outer street that leads onto the Millennium Bridge. In many ways this simple room of glowing glass walls and a wooden ceiling is the gem of the building.
Below this suite are the public areas. These include a large basement conference and public cafe area above which the reception floor is propped on raked concrete legs (a device also used — rather less dramatically — on the Abbey building at Regent’s Place, on Euston Road). The conference area actually sits beneath the bridge access walkway (see the section overleaf).
The other notable feature of the London Sally that draws people’s attention is the facade treatment. This overlays the principal and west-facing facade with angled and ‘fritted’ glass panels that float well in front of the main, double-glazed, floor to ceiling windows. The architects originally had these along the northern side, too, but the developer objected to the blurring of views as well as a functionally unnecessary cost, so they were omitted.
Then, of course, there was the St. Paul’s heights issue: air conditioning plant normally on the roof had to be accommodated within the main volume of the building.
Overall, this is an unusual client adapting to change and providing London with one of its more interesting examples of tradition married to contemporary realities.
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Drawings: Sheppard Robson, adapted by K. A, |
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Haberdashers sits dep within the urban block and provides accommodation around a cloistered courtyard. The architecture is all about scale.
The oak panelled, double-cube livery hall with its pitched roof is on the first floor.
The Guilds remain a curiosity of City culture, many of them lost in history as well as rooted in it, and few of them desiring or managing to plausibly reinvent themselves
— except for the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, who have insinuated themselves into the urban fabric of Smithfield, deeply hidden away behind older buildings and within the heart of an urban block — giving its designers the interesting problem of how to cope with a very difficult site (entirely without street frontage) as well as any cultural and symbolic demands.
The contemporary Haberdasher’s is as much rentable conference venue as club or ancient guild, demanding a balance between these disparate roles. Hopkins deals with such issues and the site by forming a central, 20m cloistered court dominated by the barn-like volume of the main hall that is on axis to arriving visitors
— who then turn right and are taken up to the principal accommodation on a piano nobile via a spiral stair. Soft red brick, limestone and oak are predominant materials.
A fundamentally important keynote to the scheme is the handling of scale e. g. the diminutive arches of the cloister, topped by the taller windows of the first floor and, in the case of the hall, capped by a tall, pitched leaded roof with two dominant ventilating chimneys. It’s where so many architectures go wrong and Hopkins’ team have got it right. Having said that, there is no doubt that, as at Portcullis, Hopkins is here offering us his peculiar mix of old and contemporary values, courting the danger that the architecture ends up as metaphorically and emotionally dry as the construction is actually dry — which, perhaps, is exactly what clients such as Members of Parliament and Haberdashers want.
Get in during Open House London if you can’t make it at on any other occasion.
/LA St. Bartholomew’s Church, West Smithfield,
EC1, is usually offered to us because it is loaded with history: an Augustian priory, founded in 1123, partly destroyed in the Reformation, restored by various architects, notably Aston Webb, who added to the four bays of the aged choir (1886 – 98; see, for example, the transepts and west front). Forget all that and simply experience the building as a splendid mix of spaces, textures and other architectural qualities that have been layered, violently edited back, restored, and yet (somehow) have managed to retain architectural coherence and enormous character. What one experiences is, self-evidently, as much accident as design, but this hardly detracts from the satisfaction of the experience and — one must admit — its romantic undertones.
The place feels like a cliched oasis midst the raw urbanity of equally large meat market bustling with huge multi-axle trucks loaded with bloody carcasses,
an equally large hospital, the frothy life of Farringdon media types who populate the local bars and restaurants, and a background of the Barbican. Leave all this; progress down the long path from the gate (under a house of 1595, restored by Webb), through the graveyard and the lobby, into the aisle and 13th c. nave where — if you are fortunate, all will be quiet and dappled sunlight will kiss the stonework. This is surely one of London’s more pleasant architectural delights (like the John Soane Museum on a quiet day out of the tourist season). For example, on the right is a tomb of c.1405 wonderfully and irreverently slapped onto the C12th Norman construction as a paradoxical action that at once affirms and denies all concepts of order and harmony.
* C The Sainsbury Business Centre (38,400 65 sq. m.), at 33 Holborn Circus, EC1N, is a 2002 Norman Foster replacement for a ‘60’s block once occupied by the Daily Mirror (designed by Sir Owen Williams). The usual competences are there, including a large atrium entrance backed by large office floors behind vast areas of glass. The ground floor has its glazing faced with limestone louvres, lending a base to the building and a different scale and character at pavement level. Being all glass, the building improves at night, when the fagade (especially around the corner entrance area) slowly becomes transparent. But the real glitter — of a different kind — is across the road, in the jewelry shops of Hatton Garden, where all that romance about engagements and anniversaries, of a Jewish trading culture and the rest is embodied in an urban phenomenon that is a universe away from Foster’s sanitised corporate beast and home for 2600 workers across the road.
66 The JP Morgan building (John Carpenter Street, EC4; BDP, 1992; tube: Blackfriars) is a surreal Po-Mo building that reinvents the Renaissance palace as a deep-plan financial trading centre, over
66,0 sq. m. gross, with two trading floors of 4645 sq. m. each and 55% of its volume given over to services: a fortress buzzing with digitised financial trading involving sums one can hardly imagine. Fully one third of the floor space is underground, in order not to contravene height restrictions near to St. Paul’s. Overall, the accommodation is split into two parts: a Main building and, across the road, an Island (support) building. The design grows out of the back of a rather grand Davis & Emmanuel school of 1880 which is used as a boardroom, as one might expect. It’s big, transmogrifying the palazzo model. Classical elements (such as the cornice) become carefully proportioned functional features and air conditioning grilles marry themselves into the idea of Baroque rustication. Knowingly or not, the architects have given us a theatrically phrased monument to their own patronage by the wealth and power of the occupying latter day princes. It’s all rather Disney. .. and yet very real and not fantasy at all. Modish and ‘structural’ themes in architecture (‘Customary’ beauty and ‘Natural’ beauty, as the C17 termed it) are the appropriate informants of the scheme — perhaps not quite as someone like Sir Christopher Wren might intend it, but the principles are the same. But if you think such theatricality died between about 1990 – 4 (with the UK recession of about that date) then take a closer look at much of Foster’s work, for example, from the last ten years. Buildings like 24 Gresham Street (sub-Mies) and that taken over by Bloomberg (sub-SOM, circa 1960’s).
f-j Most of the original Smithfield meat market 8 ‘ buildings (Smithfield Market, Charterhouse Street, EC1) were designed by Horace Jones (the Tower Bridge architect) and completed in 1831. What one now sees is HLM’s 1994 renewal of the facilities in order to bring them into line with European Union standards. It didn’t come cheap and HLM have taken the opportunity to offer an idiosyncratic mix of stainless steel modernism and a colourful renovation of Jones’ sheds. Two new floors have been added within the existing frame, providing offices and facilities for the traders. A principal difficulty with the design is the peripheral glazed canopy which proclaims a reinvention of the facilities, but offers little else and clearly presents maintenance problems (it is always dirty), but bike couriers find it convenient.
A Q This already ageing folly in Farringdon (44 Britton 68 Street, EC1 Janet Street-Porter/ CZWG, 1988) sits on a corner site in an area better known for offices and studios. The design — which exemplifies the playful dimension of English Post-Modernism — emphasises the corner, plays vaguely contextural games with window arrangements, inscribes huge squares, offers an un-London blue glazed roof, and adds ‘log’ lintels that some critics have likened to a ‘knowing’ comment on the C18th Abbe Laugier’s notes about architectural origins(!). The brickwork was Porter’s idea of cast shadows and
descriptions of the interiors by the owner are daffy, joyful and dominated by a jokey desire for the place to look ‘wrecked’. It was an existential statement. But, for some reason architecture and frivolity invariably make poor bed-fellows. But it is clever and it is fun. Then the owner moved on. And so did architectural fashions.
London’s architectural geography has two principal poles or areas of focus about which everything else revolves. The first is the City of London. The second is Whitehall, where the church, the crown, court and government have always been located. The church was represented by Westminster Abbey, the crown by the palaces of Whitehall (and now Buckingham Palace and others), with government centred at Downing Street, off Whitehall itself.
Westminster is where Edward the Confessor founded a royal palace in the C11, adjacent to a Benedictine abbey of obscure origins, already a place where kings were crowned when the Normans conquered England. Later, the royal residence of the Palace of Westminster shifted to Whitehall Palace and the former residence became the place where the Lords and the Commons met. Most of Whitehall Palace was destroyed by fire in 1698, apart from Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House. In 1834 the Palace of Westminster was also burned down, prompting a competition for new Houses of Parliament, ‘in the Gothic or Elizabethan style’. This resulted in the present design, by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin – in turn, damaged during WWII, restored by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, and now supplemented by Portcullis House, designed by Sir Michael Hopkins.
As London expanded westward from the City and northward from Whitehall, the aristocratic estates of west London were speculatively developed into the set of Georgian streets and squares that characterise much of the so-called West End. The first of the latter included St. James’ Square, Covent Garden, Lincoln’s Inn and Bloomsbury Square, while the grander residential areas around Belgravia tend to be early or later C19. Many of the former residences have now been converted to offices, but significant areas remain in domestic or mixed use and some fine Georgian terraces exist in Bloomsbury (despite inter and post-war enthusiasms for ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ — visible, for example, around London University and at Brunswick Square). This area is more or less bounded by Piccadilly to the south and Marylebone Road to the north, and between Park Lane to the west and Kingsway to the east.
The private and speculative nature of the West End’s urban developments is one of its important features. Even Regent’s Street and Park were privately financed and it is only in the later Victorian period and the early years of the C20 that civic-minded ‘improvements’ cut new streets (such as Shaftesbury Avenue, the Aldwych and Kingsway) through the old fabric and created significant urban features such as the Embankments. One can’t imagine such interventions being repeated.
Meanwhile, Whitehall consolidated as an area of government buildings adjacent to the royal palaces of the Mall and St. James’, spreading west into the Victoria area (where you can also find the Richard Rogers’ design for Channel Four). Perhaps the next (inevitable?) stage is this development will be the vacation of the palaces and their conversion into tourist venues (a process that appears to have already begun).
Left: inside the central court to the Foreign Office.
Right: C17th and C18th buildings and ‘Vitruvius Brittannicus’: Inigo Jones — a key figure in the introduction of ‘regularity to London’s urban fabric.
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Horse Guards, Whitehall (St. James’ Park side) |
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The West End has come to be defined as a central area ringed by older ‘village’ centres such as Knightsbridge, Notting Hill, Marylebone, St, Pancras, Angel, etc. — places of disparate architectural character and development opportunity. Even the central heartland is divided between the pretensions of St. James’, the government quarter of Whitehall, an Oxford Street separated into distinct shopping halves at Oxford Circus, the two entertainment areas of Covent Garden and Soho (which should be similar but are very dissimilar), and the ‘in between’ area (in between the West End and the City) of Holborn, bounded on the west by the electronic and furniture offerings of Tottenham Court Road and, on the east, by the utterly different characters of the Temple and the studio warehouses of Clerkenwell. Seemingly, the only thing unifying such disparities is the fact that this is the historic heart of London, mostly developed during a boom period of ‘Georgian’ expansion during the late seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
The architectural interest of the West End is embedded in this history and the place’s deep-rooted urban character. For example, it is difficult to appreciate Hopkins’ Portcullis without addressing its context: Scotland Yard and the Palace of Westminster. Somerset House means more if one appreciates it as a riverside palace supplanting an earlier palace and at odds with a competing work of architecture (the Aldelphi) just upstream. (Similarly, Farrell’s Embankment Place has less meaning when divorced from this series of large riverside works.) To the east, buildings in Clerkenwell have to be dealt with as the reinvention of what was once the backyard of Fleet Street newspapers, just as Fleet Street itself was partly appropriated by the City following the exodus to Docklands. And to the west, Knightsbridge and Notting Hill have become ever stronger bastions of affluence, resistant to significant architectural change.
Overall, almost without exception, important architectural work in the West End appears increasingly contextural and to engage a broad range of issues. The new British Library cannot be divorced from its relations with the British Museum and plans that go back to the 1960’s. Foster’s Great Court at the BM is very much a part of a pattern of expansion and alteration that has always characterised the BM. Venturi’s Sainsbury Wing may be loaded with his North American, Post-Modern concerns, but it is literally locked into formal relations with a National Gallery architecture created more than 150 years previously.
This is hardly to claim that the area isn’t changing. Even as we write about the West End in these terms, this book already acknowledges how its southern edge — the River Thames — has recently been redefined, at once breaking away whilst simultaneously linking the two banks of the river and thus extending the West End into southern parts from which it has long been divorced.
While ‘improvement’ in the ambitious Victorian sense has largely evolved into a tinkering with traffic schemes, the Mayor’s ambitious decongestion charging and schemes for many central London squares (including the work realised at Trafalgar Square), a myriad of comparatively short-lived designs in the form of new retail outlets such as cafes, restaurants, shops and art galleries continue to inform the bigger picture and lend a vibrancy to London that it has not experienced in living memory (no, not even in the ‘swinging ‘60’s’). This is nowhere more evident than in the night life of the West End. Nothing lasts, but — in recent years — the joint has been jumping. One’s conclusion is that an enjoyment of the West End’s contemporary architecture can hardly be divorced from the totality of the area, its urban history and continued reinvention. It’s as if — to paraphrase one London historian, PeterAckroyd — the city has an underlying nature that quietly but adamantly insinuates new development, absorbing it all into a unified character that alters less than we sometimes presume. Whether that rumination is depressing or intriguing we leave to the reader. However, it touches upon a traditional architectural concept: the notion of a rational, ‘natural beauty’ with which an architect must be attuned (what is fundamental, lawful and ‘structural’) and a ‘customary’ (creaturely or modish) beauty to which they must also conform. The latter is certainly a key characteristic of parts of the West End — an area that City folk have traditionally sneered at.
More radical change is currently concentrated along the Paddington Basin / Kings Cross axis of Marylebone and Euston Roads, particularly around the latter (and working westward).
In terms of London’s architectural geography, the West End serves as the twin to the City. While the latter has traditionally been the home and focal point of trading powers, the West End has been its counterbalancing opposite pole where the monarch, the court, civil servants and the Houses of Parliament were to be found. The River Thames
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— London’s historical life blood, both literally and symbolically
— once served as a crucial highway link and, in recent years, has been ‘rediscovered’. In between these two lay Holborn (including Fleet Street and the Temple, now also the home of London University)
— traditionally an area of lawyers and journalists gossiping and benefiting by what was taking place on either side of them. The movement of the journalists to other locations (particularly to docklands and to Canary Wharf) has not altered the underlying pattern. This urban geography and its inherent social, economic and political patterns is still a fundamental
part of London life. The annual speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the principal finance minister) to City dignatories is an important event. Similarly, St Paul’s Cathedral stands as the major symbol of the presence of the church midst Mammon – and engenders London’s most ceremonial route, between Cathedral and Buckingham The latter is hardly a significant work of architecture, but it and location are hugely important. same has to be said for Abbey, sitting opposite the Houses of Parliament, within the Palace of Westminster. The remainder of the West End is characterised by a development phase from about the late 1600’s to the early 1800’s, when many of its formal squares and terraces were laid out as speculative developments, most of them exploiting a tradition of royal patronage and aristocratic land ownership. In an enlarged sense that embraces the development of Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Kensington, etc., the West End and the City together can be considered to be bounded by the route of the Circle Line. However, above ground, the western urban boundary of the West End has natural edges along Edgware Road, Park Lane and Vauxhaul Bridge Road (also the boundary between Westminster and adjacent boroughs).
Trafalgar Square — especially as relaid out by the Foster team in 1 order to ease pedestrian flows between the square itself and the National Gallery — sits as a strong termination to the north-south line of Whitehall, closing off a government area from the street-life realities of Leicester Square and similar places that lie immediately to the north, effectively turning its back upon them and orienting itself toward the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Off to its right lies Pall Mall, leading up to Buckingham Palace; off to its east lies the Strand and Fleet Street, leading directly into the City. It is thus quite a symbolic place.
The history of the square dates back to John Nash and the urban developments and redevelopments of the C18th and early C19th. Apart from The National Gallery itself, the key features of the Square are the fountains and a Corinthian column topped by a statue of Nelson (raised in 1843). This column towers above a square that has always attracted political crowds and stirred paranoia in the minds of the establishment, engendering features such as the crowd-disrupting fountains placed there in 1845, later modified by Edwin Lutyens and now a feature of Foster’s reclamation of the square (a ‘world’s square’ project that excludes traffic from the northern side). The latter work transformed the square, returning it back to the people, but now as a place characterised by entertainment events (managed by the Mayor’s office) rather than riotous behaviour.
Admiralty Arch (1911, left), on the south-west side of Trafalgar Square, WC2, is a triumphal arch straddling the entrance to the Mall, its tapered plan attempting a formal transition designed to reconcile the dissimilar urban geometries comprising the cermonial route from Buckingham Palace, through the central Arch, along the Strand and Fleet Street to St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City (a rather important aspect of London’s architectural and urban geography). It was designed by Sir Aston Webb who (like Foster now) had, at that time, one of the largest practices in the country. The Deputy Prime Minister currently houses himself in the upper parts.
James Gibbs’ St. Martin’s – in-the-Fields (1720-26) in Trafalgar Square is a much – copied, Roman-inspired design whose symbolism is almost Hollywood Gothic (take a pagan temple, complete with portico, and drive a Christian stake (i. e. the tower) through its heart). The interiors were amended by Reginald Blomfield, 1887, and there are current plans to make significant extensions. Nearby, at the Aldwych, you will find St. Mary-le-Strand, another fine church by Gibbs (1717), who was at one time involved at Burlington House (before Palladianism reigned supreme).
In a London of half-timbered Tudorbethan buildings, Inigo 4 Jones’s Banqueting House (1619) in Whitehall, SW1, must have been horribly modern, foreign, erudite and shocking as well as ultra-fashionable among the aristocrats who held parties there. This alien from foreign parts was a message from on high to the Philistines below, as well as a play-palace for King Charles. Yet it was also a classic example of belief in what was later expressed as ‘customary’ and natural’ beauty. The ‘customary’ (modish) part was the lavish banqueting; the ‘natural’ beauty was embodied in the geometries of the fagade and the double-cube room at its heart which encapsulate the cosmological beliefs of the day in hierarchy, order, decorum and proportion: ‘Untune the string and hark what discord follows’, remarked one of Shakespeare’s characters. No doubt the Banqueting House once experienced its share of untuned strings.
Whitehall is a fine place to walk and enjoy 5 the Cenotaph, the Banqueting House (1619 – 22), Horse Guards (1750 – 9), New Scotland Yard (1890), and government buildings such as the Foreign Office (186275), the Ministry of Defence (1939 – 59), and Portcullis House (2001). But one of its better buildings sits as a hardly noticeable, quiet backdrop: Dover House (now Scotland office; the west facade appears in Horse Guards), designed by Richard Paine and constructed 1754 – 8, with significant parts (particularly the entrance areas behind the street screen) by Henry Holland.
The screen wall itself is particularly elegant and a rare example of barely adorned rustication. (Sometimes open for Open House London.)
One can’t discuss Whitehall without mentioning Downing 6 Street — a street dating from 1682. All that remains of it are
the two most significant residences: that of the Prime Minister and of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The former dates from a remodelling for the then Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole — not that you can see much from the IRA-proof gates that were placed there in 1989. No.10 is actually a marvellous piece of theatre — a massive and vastly reconstructed home / office concealed behind its relatively modest fagade. A refacing took place in 1766 and Raymond Erith (the late partner of Quinlan Terry) effectively reconstructed the interiors in 1960-4. Other architectural names associated with the place include Sir Robert Taylor and Sir John Soane. Immediately to the south is Foreign & Commonwealth Office, by Sir George Gilbert Scott. The building on the north corner of Downing Street is the Old treasury building — a vast warren of a place usually open for London Open House.
Within the depths of Buckingham Palace (1705 – 1913; Buckingham Gate, SW1, at the end of The Mall, 7 laid out in 1660) are the remains of the original country house, which became the focus of the Prince
Regent’s attention in the 1820’s. John Nash was the architect and neither he nor the Prince Regent came out of the reconstruction without scandal (the former overspending the budget by some 300%; the latter benefiting privately from the works and being replaced by Edward Bloie). Other architects were later engaged, but the present frontage and ‘rond point’ (including the Victoria Memorial by Sir Thomas Brock, 1911) are by Aston Webb, 1913. Slowly, parts of the Palace are being opened up to the public (such as the 2002 Royal Collection galleries by the Prince of Wales’ favourite architect, John Simpson) and Terry Farrell has undertaken a scheme to take this trend to a more radical conclusion (unlikely to be in the immediate future). Meanwhile, the true significance of the Palace concerns urban design issues rather than its heavily criticised and unloved architectural qualities, i. e. its role as the beginning of an impromptu royal, processional route from here, along the Mall, through Aston Webb’s Admiralty Arch, down the old avenues of Strand and Fleet Street and on to St. Paul’s Cathedral in the City itself.
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Modelled on Parisian (right) was designed in 1815 by one of the more pleasant The less pleasant end |
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When Norman Shaw’s New Scotland Yard building was opened as a new home of the Metropolitan Police on the Victoria Embankment in 1890, it was popularly known as ‘the jam factory’ because of its horizontal bands of alternating red brick and Portland stone that were similar to a Crosse & Blackwell Pickle Factory in Charing Cross Road. Among its other peculiarities of this ‘very constabulary’ building, as it has been described, was the fact that the lower granite walls of Shaw’s fortified, castle-like edifice were quarried by prisoners at Dartmoor and constructed upon the foundations of an incomplete national opera house. After ‘the Met’ moved out of Scotland Yard to a nearby building (of 1967), the ‘Norman Shaw Building’, as it had became known, became a useful adjunct to the Palace of Westminster, just across the road. In turn, the growing complex of parliamentary accommodation was recently added to with a new building on the corner of the Embankment, known appropriately as Portcullis House, providing additional and much-needed offices and meeting rooms for Members of Parliament. Scotland Yard is square in plan, with a central courtyard; its roof is steep and dominated by huge brick chimneys — all of which served as motifs for the Portcullis design.
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Portcullis House |
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The Design The design of Portcullis is basically a five-storey, rectangular donut with a 13.2m deep perimeter of offices off a double-loaded corridor, intended to accommodate 210 Members of Parliament and linked to Barry’s splendid building across the road by an underground tunnel — all designed to a brief that required the building to last 200 years. And be terrorist-proof. And also to be aesthetically satisfactory. Most people are not entirely happy with how the last criterion has been meant, without being able to say why. |
However, Hopkins’ design does more than pick up on a tradition of medieval and defensive references suggested by the building’s name.
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Norman Shaw’s New Scotland Yard building on Victoria Embankment (access from Parliament Street, SW1) is in two parts. The first and better half was designed and built between 1887-90 and the second between 1901 – 07. Both served the Metropolitan Police and are described by one historian as the nearest Shaw came to being serious (Baroque and Scottish Baronial). The base is made from granite quarried by convicts at Dartmoor. Above this rises a stout, square block in red brick with Portland stone stripes. The whole is topped by large gables and tall chimneys. At the corners, ‘tourelles’ are provided which help to give the building a stately castle air of the kind Shaw was familiar with from his Scottish background. |
It also tries hard to architecturally nestle into the historical tradition whilst remaining a contemporary act of design and construction, emulating many of Shaw’s major architectural moves, particularly the general plan and roof forms. And make no bones about it: this is also a defensive design. Its cladding as surreptitiously bomb proof against today’s terrorists as Shaw’s had to be in its day (the original Scotland Yard buildings had been bombed in 1884).
The other contextural reference for Hopkins has been the Palace of Westminster itself. Dominated by the tower of Big Ben, the Charles Barry and Auguste Pugin design (completed in the 1850’s) is surprisingly regular, and evenly modulated, and has a strong vertical character that fights against its horizontal massing. It is this regular vertical emphasis that Hopkins picks up on and applies to his own facades. In this way he strongly and positively responds to the two significant works of architecture that define a context for the Portcullis House design.
The outcome has been a contentious building that divides opinion. But as an example of architectural gamesmanship it is remarkable, offering two surprises to its contextural game: an amazing, neo-Piranesian Underground station beneath the building (Westminster station) and a timber-framed courtyard roof that is quite outstanding and a contrast with the rather comparatively dour exterior.