Rogers returns

The first thing that strikes you about 88 Wood Street is that it is more orderly, better mannered and less frenetic – although perhaps less exciting – than its precursor. The front facade on Wood Street, for instance, is a meticulously tailored – and by Lloyd’s standards, demure – flush facade of storey-height glass panels separated by horizontal strips of grey, colour-coated metal panels. Along the side facade on London Wall, however, are a few of the hi-tec high jinks that are Rogers’ hallmark – bright yellow structural steel, panoramic lifts, and bright blue and red funnels that pop up from the pavement like gaudy toadstools.

If there is one component that distinguishes 88 Wood Street from the Lloyd’s building, it is glazing. Clear, transparent glazing. And a specially refined glass at that – one even more transparent than standard clear glass – which added £750 000 to the £18m cladding contract. Known as low-iron glass, it is cast at high temperatures to burn out iron impurities. Specified in the 1980s for the famous glass pyramid outside the Louvre in Paris, low-iron glass manufactured by Saint-Gobain under the trade name Diamant Extra White Glass has been used for the bulk of 88 Wood Street’s external envelope, making it the largest quantity of the special glass ever used in a single building.

Like the emperor’s new clothes, the glass vanishes when looked at, although, unlike the emperor’s outfit, it exists as a physical, protective cover.

This super-transparent skin has allowed Rogers to flaunt many of its favourite hi-tec features, yet shield them from the damaging effects of British weather and London pollution. At 88 Wood Street, the panoramic lifts are every bit as exposed to view as those in the Lloyd’s building, but they are protected by the frameless glazing encasing the lift shafts. The lift lobbies on each floor end in a single pane of nearly invisible glass that stretches from floor to ceiling and from one side to the other, visually turning the lift lobbies into external balconies overlooking the Barbican development and London’s skyline beyond. The stairs and the panoramic lifts, both ensconced in their own fully glazed towers, offer even more exhilarating views as they zip up and down the flank of the building.

Such uncompromising transparency puts a premium on detailed design. As Rogers’ project architect Russell Gilchrist says: “The last thing you want to see is a dingy old lift shaft.” Accordingly, the lifts were manufactured in Japan by Mitsubishi to be the last word in precision engineering. The slenderest of steel guide rails were fitted in the lift shafts, aligned with just two sets of pencil-thin shims and lubricated with dirt-resistant silicone-based grease.

As far as the building’s occupants are concerned, the glass has also been used to stunning effect on the office floors. Although otherwise conventionally fitted out with raised floors and flat, suspended ceilings, the office space is enclosed behind huge 3 m wide triple-glazed windows – incorporating what are reputedly the largest double-glazed panels ever manufactured.

The result is that occupants have a panoramic view across the capital on three sides – stretching from St Paul’s Cathedral and the new London Eye to the west, around past the Barbican development to Docklands in the east. Indeed, this profusion of ultra-transparent glass is so dazzling that all external double-glazed panels to the offices are fitted with motorised cavity blinds to cut out glare.

The ultra-transparent glass also stars in the triple-height entrance hall, which occupies nearly half the ground floor. Here again, external walls are visually non-existent, as are the enclosing walls to the two pairs of lift and stair towers, so that space flows unimpeded from the building to the surrounding streetscape.

The only opaque or solid elements are one flank wall in polished plaster panels, a few rows of cylindrical concrete columns, a coffered concrete floor slab high overhead and rough granite slabs underfoot that extend beyond the glazed walls. The effect within the confines of the City is strangely liberating – if rather raw and stark – like finding yourself standing in the remains of a colonnaded temple preserved from antiquity.

The only dampener on this expansive scene is that, except for a postage stamp-sized park to the west, the building is surrounded by the visual chaos of London Wall and its sidestreets.

Turning from the building’s fabric to its basic configuration, a deeper family resemblance to the Lloyd’s building can be traced. The brief for the Lloyd’s building was to create the largest possible insurance-dealing floor on a tight and irregular site. Rogers responded by placing the largest possible rectangular hall on the site, and mopping up the odd leftover corners for access and service functions.

At 88 Wood Street, the designers have used a similar approach of logical geometry to fit standard building forms onto an irregular site. Daiwa’s brief was to fit as much high-quality office floor space as possible onto the 65 m deep triangular site within a height restriction of 18 storeys imposed by City planners. Rogers’ response has been to extrude a standard 18 m deep strip of office space, cut it into three lengths of various heights and stack them in parallel across the site, with each block stretching from one site boundary to the other. The lift and stair towers, toilets and service risers have all been tucked into the 10 m gaps separating the three strips of office space.

This stacked arrangement has several advantages. First, unimpeded office space, which benefits from generous daylighting and views, is regularly and efficiently distributed across an irregular site. On the lower floors, where the office strips are linked together, the links can be used to house office equipment.

Second, the stacking arrangement enables the large 33 000 m² building to be broken into three separate blocks that could be let to separate tenants.

Third, in architectural terms, the three parallel blocks rise up in three regular steps in response to the disparate cityscape surrounding the site. Starting with an eight-storey frontage that fits into the existing cornice line on Wood Street, the building steps up to a 14-storey middle block equivalent to existing buildings behind the site. It then rises to the uppermost 18-storey slab, similar in height to the adjacent Alban Gate by Terry Farrell & Partners and other office towers on London Wall.

Finally, the stacking arrangement of strips has, through its intrinsic geometry, generated elevations to the front and rear that are in marked contrast to the flank elevation facing London Wall – a design feature commended by the Royal Fine Art Commission. The front and rear facades, facing Wood Street and the small park respectively, are formed by the full-length external elevations of the office strips. These smooth facades with their horizontal emphasis are as orderly and refined as hand-made pinstripe suits. The side elevation, however, is made up of the gable ends of these office strips along with the stair and lift towers. It is jagged in outline, vertical in emphasis and displays the contents of the lift and stair towers – a dynamic scene that befits the traffic-dominated dual carriageway of London Wall.

Fourteen years after the completion of the controversial Lloyd’s building, 88 Wood Street demonstrates that many of the hallmarks of the Richard Rogers Partnership are alive and well. These are the efficient arrangement of accommodation coupled with the visual excitement of flamboyant forms and expansive volumes. What has been dropped is the exposure of vulnerable service elements to the vagaries of the external environment.

Given the £8m bill to repair exposed services on the Lloyd’s building, this is hardly a loss. Yet, thanks to the ultra-transparent glass, these items are still displayed as an integral component of the architectural composition.