Archive for the 'Sandy' Category
Technophilia
Lloyd’s of London is a market for insurance underwriters. Beginning in 1688 in a coffee house, the underwriters come together to pool risk and sell insurance. Initially just for shipping, Lloyd’s now provides insurance for absolutely anything with value. The company, er, the ‘market,’ had changed offices often, to acccommodate its growth, so in the 1960s, when it began to consider expanding again, it sought a design that would provide maximum flexibility, that is, a space that could be adapted to changing circumstances.
Richard Rogers is the architect of Lloyd’s. He studied at Yale in 1961-62, the same time as Norman Foster, his comrade-in-high-tech. He came to international attention along with Renzo Piano when they won the competition for the Pompidou Center in Paris. It was very controversial at first, especially given how uniform the rest of Paris is, but, with its expressive systems and bright colors, has come to be a major attraction.
Lloyd’s ran a limited competition and selected Rogers for the job. Begun in 1977, the building was completed in 1986. Rogers designed a central trading floor with upper level galleries surrounding an atrium that goes up twelve floors. Separate service towers contain stairs, elevators, ventilation and heating equipment, and are pulled to the exterior of the building to exploit the irregular geometry of the site and to create the dynamic—literally– facade. Other than widely-spaced concrete columns, the interior is left completely open. A set of escalators forms a dramatic, moving people-scape at one end of the atrium. The interior buzzes with activity.
The major interior materials of Lloyd’s are massive concrete columns that carry gridded concrete floor slabs. Steel supports the glass in the walls and at balconies. Marble and carpeting cover most floors and interior walls are often finished with wood. At least two rooms from older buildings have been brought in and reassembled as meeting rooms. On the outside, steel and glass are much more prominent, especially in the service towers.
Lloyd’s is one of the icons of “High Tech” architecture, which describes the exploitation of a building’s structure and systems for aesthetic effect. Based on the idea that buildings are essentially big machines, High Tech emphasizes the idea of mechanism, and tries to make evident all the different parts that go into making a building work, rather than hiding them behind walls, as is usually the case. The Pompidou Center in Paris, from 1971-77, is also by Rogers, along with Renzo Piano, and is an evident precedent for Lloyd’s.
Questions that occur for high-tech architecture: How many such buildings can there be, that is, doesn’t the style require for its impact that other buildings be rather modest, to act as backdrops?
Does high-tech design continue leading modernist themes of taking aesthetic advantage of building materials and methods, or perfecting its own means of making, or is it just a fetish?
Is high-tech really about architecture, or engineering? And what’s the difference anyway?