Chase/the dream

In New York, architecture critics have mauled a new office development in Midtown. In London, residents are opposing a new office development in the Barbican. JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the owner of the former and was client for an abortive scheme near the latter; it also continues to quietly occupy a striking building elsewhere that few seem to notice. So if Britain and America are two countries divided by a common language, is that also true of buildings in both territories commissioned by the same firm?

Nineteenth century financier John Pierpont Morgan founded his bank in Manhattan but it went on to hold a controlling interest in UK banking house Morgan, Grenfell & Co., indirectly own the doomed British liner Titanic and bid for the rights to open one of London’s tube lines, so it’s hardly surprising that the firm should create notable buildings on both sides of the Atlantic. Let’s start by looking at the latest to be put up on home soil.

The big new one over there

Keeping the address of its immediate predecessor, 270 Park Avenue opened last autumn after four years of construction. It was designed for JPMorgan Chase & Co. by Foster + Partners, replacing – controversially – an International Style tower of 1960 by SOM that the bank had acquired through merger and subsequently occupied. The accumulation of air rights from neighbours allowed the new building to reach sixty floors in height, massed as a  symmetrically stepped block with four set-backs flanking the tallest central section. In plan, the floors widen toward their centre and there is a slight batter to the two long sides of the building as it rises.

A diagrid let into those facades provides the floors’ primary support, whilst significant structural gymnastics were necessary to make the entire building “touch the ground lightly” as the practice puts it. Thus massive and complex “fan-columns” exposed – indeed, celebrated – at street level visually lift the building above an 80-foot-tall lobby, allowing views through and increasing the amount of outdoor space within the plot that is accessible to the public.

Inside that travertine-sheathed lobby, a space for which the word is surely inadequate, a “monumental” staircase passes between vast abutments, bifurcated columns and a pair of immense art panels. A total of 24 lifts serve the almost column-free floors and the triple-height “exchange” part way up the building, which acts a transfer point and meeting place for the 15,000 workers. The usual wellbeing and executive areas are present.

Reactions have ranged from the grudging to the grim, with the sheer expanse (and expense) the most common targets of criticism. It is of course impossible to judge the building properly without visiting it, but for me the slightly tricksy articulation, excessive though elegant volumes and rich yet restrained palette are clearly reminiscent of Foster’s earlier work for Bloomberg (another New York native) in London, flaws and all. Some have drawn a parallel between the bounding ambition of the building (Foster himself designed the self-flying flagpole found inside) and the current political climate in the US, although JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s chairman Jamie Dimon appears neutral toward the President himself. Power isn’t always enough, though. Back on my side of the ocean, it’s time to track the bank’s building that was never started.

The one that got away over here

A quarter-century ago, as the Millennium dawned, a merger with Chase Manhattan saw JP Morgan move its UK headquarters to a building in the City of London which Chase already used – Terry Farrell’s eye-catching Alban Gate on London Wall, immediately south of the Barbican. Driven by the Eighties’ deregulation of the Square Mile, this boldly-styled and -massed Post-Modern block with its vast dealing floors straddling a dual carriageway came to epitomise ‘Big Bang’ and the yuppie era.

It’s helpful to understand that this eastern stretch of the Blitzed London Wall had been radically reshaped during post-war reconstruction, embodying Le Corbusier’s theories of tall blocks rising from separated pedestrian and vehicle circulation (this was to be a commercial development; its residential counterpoint, the Barbican, came later). Echoing a similar scheme in Stockholm, four near-identical office towers were erected north of the newly-fast road and two to the south, but crucially each was orientated at a 45 degree angle to the road to increase daylight and airflow, producing a highly distinctive serrated plan that would condition all future schemes in the area – Alban Gate, for example, was the first of a new generation of towers that would supplant the originals but it retained that alignment.

The bank must have liked the location since, a few years later, it partnered with developer Hammerson to bring forward a purpose-designed building to replace the next tower along, St Alphage House, which was named after the ruins of a church preserved somewhat antiseptically amidst the concrete. American practice Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) was engaged to design what The Architect’s Journal described as the UK’s largest office building; it may have been, but it was certainly one of the least publicised. No pictures reached the trade press let alone the mass media, and my own research over the years has only uncovered a single, poor-quality model shot and a mosaic of small images posted by a former KPF staffer which I’ve combined for this post. But we can determine something of what JP Morgan’s 1 million square foot European Headquarters on London Wall would have looked like, had the project been completed. 

A tower remained the central feature, and discernibly (if barely) on that mandatory alignment too, albeit one no longer ruthlessly rectilinear in its treatment. Gentle curves and slopes would instead reflect the emerging contemporary aesthetic and seek to exploit views toward the Thames. A shorter but nevertheless substantial wing – too substantial, surely, to still be called a podium, although KPF text I have located does – extended eastward, presumably housing the four trading floors that were “at 72,000 square feet each […] the largest in London”. Greened roof terraces above were an early example of this amenity. A much smaller four-storey block to the west was intended for retail and restaurant use, whilst a “beautifully landscaped and verdant” public garden containing a series of water features would push south from Salters’ Hall and encompass the church.

The scheme would have presented an interesting evolution of the rigid Corbusian model, but as with so many City schemes, plans changed and in 2008 JP Morgan announced it would actually be relocating to Canary Wharf. Hammerson retained the London Wall site and decided to run a competition for a building intended for speculative occupation. Amongst the entries was that from David Walker Architects, which practice was developing a reputation for contextual yet efficient designs in the specialist field of the City. Speaking to me for this piece Walker notes that the serrated planform present in his proposal also relates to the “interrupted site ownership” along London Wall that includes a portion of the Roman Wall that gives the road its name. “The western end of the site is also a separate site,” he added. “Similarly, there are view corridors which cross the site, restricting height in those areas.”

Ken Shuttleworth’s practice MAKE won the competition, producing the first version of what became London Wall Place, which also follows the serrations set out 70-odd years ago. from its highest floors you can see the site, a few hundred metres north on the other side of the Barbican estate, where plans to replace blocks with larger ones have drawn the ire that I mentioned at the start. JP Morgan didn’t get their new headquarters but that may not have mattered since, a mile or so away, the bank was happily ensconced in a large, intelligent and rather underappreciated building that they had built in the early Nineties.   

The cool one everyone forgets

Tucked behind an imposing Victorian frontage that was once the City of London School (which gained ‘…for Boys’ after the girls’ school opened and later moved to St Paul’s riverside) is the stupendous 60 Victoria Embankment. Designed by BDP and built between 1987 and 1991, it is one of the largest and most interesting buildings of that period yet although it was published, it remains almost unknown today.

This ‘groundscraper’ mixed new build (on the site of the playground and annexe buildings) with retained façades across two plots either side of a road – the buildings were in fact linked by three subterranean service levels, including parking, plant and an apparent bullion vault. Heavily serviced, including two trading floors, half the volume of the complex was devoted to services and half the budget. But all of that is invisible; it is those new elevations that demand attention. Horizontally defined, each differently treated, they progress up the building from saw-cut rustication – richly tactile – to polished and shaped ashlar, with even the cleaning cradle track reading as a cornice. With subtle details and inlet glazing, the result is a Post-Modern palazzo that fits its grid-like street pattern with wit and panache.

JP Morgan liked the block so much they purchased the freehold in 2010. TP Bennett were engaged a dozen years ago to add terraces, lighten some of the fenestration and modernise the entrance – the street here has been pedestrianised for security. The building is home to the bank’s private wealth operation.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is the largest institution of its type in the world. Its architectural footprint reflects that. And whilst it’s hard to imagine topping 270 Park Avenue anytime soon, there is more to come in Britain’s capital.

The next one?

The bank still occupies space in Canary Wharf, having taken the appropriately-named 25 Bank Street after the insolvency of Lehman Brothers. The same financial crash that allowed that to happen also pressed pause on construction of its new building by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners elsewhere on the Isle of Dogs. Now, almost twenty years later, the foundation works started so long ago are being having the rust brushed off for a revised and very big scheme by… Foster + Partners, fresh from enjoying their bite of the Big Apple.

It seems that some dreams remain elusive no matter how hard you chase them.