The ground floor of Portcullis provides shops and an entrance to the underground station on the street side and the building’s main entrance along the river side. Internally, it is dealt with as one large room that reaches up two storeys and is covered by an arching laminated oak and glass roof studded with stainless steel fixings and bracing. The central part of this floor is a landscaped court with small trees and pools. On one side is a cafeteria and a waiter-service restaurant on the other, opposite the main doors. There is also an escalator that drops down to a tunnel leading under the road and links directly to the Palace of Westminster. A gallery runs around the space at first floor level, serving a series of committee and seminar rooms. This gallery runs behind six huge concrete arches that receive the building loads above and transfer them to pillars that penetrate through the lower structures beneath the building.
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Westminster Underground |
At the heart of the Portcullis House donut is a central courtyard and at each corner of the building there is a set of lifts and stairs. In principle, it’s very simple. However, the building sits upon a massive structural zone that enables the relatively shallow District and Circle Lines to pass beneath it. In turn, this sits upon a deep ‘escalator box’ that drops down to the deep level of the Jubilee Line tubes. This ‘box’ is an outstanding experience, redolent with Piranesian references. You must go there.
The aluminium bronze alloy roof of Portcullis (three storeys high) is a ventilation system. The ‘chimneys’ draw foul air from the building, pulling it through huge pre-fabricated roof ducts (from secondary ducting built into the fagade) up to where it is vented. And the roof form accommodates the machinery that draws the air out and pulls fresh air in (from the base of the chimneys), processing it and pumping it back into the building by means of other ducts in the fagade that feed down and into deep floor voids, from where it gently enters the offices – and then leaves via the perimeter fagade ducts. 13 chimneys extract and discharge air; the 14th chimney serves a generator and the boiler flues. Water for the air conditioning comes from two deep bore holes. This is fed through heat exchanges and provides cooling, thus obviating the need for refrigeration plant. (The same water is used as ‘grey water’ in the sanitary systems.) The roof, for example, includes three-storey, 700mm deep spine ducts cast from welded 6mm aluminium bronze plates assembled off site. Each duct assembly — weighing 3 tonnes and containing insulated air intake and extract ducts — is put together with an arching roof structure of steel and alumin… architecture.
The roof arrangement for housing plant and processing air is merely one part of a complex servicing arrangement that provides the building with a rather sophisticated fagade — one that is virtually bomb proof, making it rather expensive. Between the vertical rhythm of Derbyshire gritstone facings on the outside are prefabricated fagade elements that comprise the ducting, windows, sun-shading and a ‘light shelf’. The windows are triple-glazed, with cavity louvre blinds. The blinds help to heat air that is drawn upward to the air conditioning plant, where heat exchangers draw the heat away and provide it to the fresh air being supplied back to the rooms.
This small demountable building (the 10 summer Buckingham Palace ticket office)
appears in the summer, camouflaged among the trees of Green Park, peeking out at the tourists visiting Buckingham Palace, like some stranded giant slug (located to the north of the Queen Victoria memorial that graces the area in front of the Palace. Its tensile roof and wooden structure serve to emphasise its temporary, summer nature as a ticket office for visitors to the Palace. Sited anywhere else, it might have aroused more architectural celebration, but one suspects this modest beast is too near royalty and throngs of tourists for most of the architectural profession. (Buckingham Palace, Birdcage Walk, SW1; Michael Hopkins & Partners, 1994; Tube: Green Park)
The Palace of Westminster (SW1,
1835-60, right) is by Charles Barry and his assistant Augustus Pugin. The latter is the dominant figure – a precocious and talented man who was an impassioned convert to Catholicism, three times married and dying in the Bedlam Asylum for the insane by the age of 40 (in 1852). Barry carried on until he was 65, but was said to have died as a man worn out by the battle to realise Westminster Palace. Conditions of the original competition stated that the design had to be in the Gothic style to harmonise with Westminster Abbey. Barry held that regularity and symmetry were the main principles in design; Pugin, who was responsible for the decoration, commented that the design was, “All Grecian, sir; Tudor details on a classic body”. Although tourist images appear to emphasise the Gothic decorative aspects of the design, it is Barry’s ordered regularity which marches across the fagades and gives the building its underlying strength.
In this unfashionable striped, stone and brick 12 fagade sitting opposite Lutyens’ Cenotaph, William Whitfield emphasises verticality against the natural horizontality of Richmond House (Parliament Street, SW1; William Whitfield and Partners, 1987) and gives street presence to a large government building behind a set-back facade that is rich in references to the C16th (e. g. the cloth-like, ‘folded’ quality of wood panelling and fagades such as that at Burghley House in Northants) and to Norman Shaw’s adjacent New Scotland Yard of 1890 (also the subject of reference by Michael Hopkins in his design for Portcullis House, the nearby facilities for Members of Parliament). Try going down the mews on the south side for a view of all three buildings.
The Cenotaph, Whitehall, SW1, by Edwin 13 Lutyens, 1919-20, is a small and dignified homage to those who died in the horrors of WWI (and is among many memorials by Lutyens including one at Tower Hill in the City – all of which are witness to the dictum of Adolf Loos that only such memorials are worthy of true architectural attention; all else should more properly be ‘dumb building’). It remains a major site of ceremony and cultural memory and depends entirely upon its simple form and materiality for impact. Originally, it was intended to burn a gas flame – which would still be a nice symbolic touch.