The sustainability agenda is now driving a host of projects that are stripping back, remodelling and upscaling office blocks originally constructed years ago. With each, the planner sets the constraints, a client provides the brief and his architect creates the design; but what about that existing building? It lacks a voice of its own, leaving others to speak for it. The worry prompted by some schemes in the City of London today – the extension apprehension, if you like – is whether anyone is listening.
Individual buildings have always been altered over time as needs and tastes change, gaining extra rooms, new façades or additional floors. By the late Victorian era banks, warehouses and other commercial premises erected in previous decades were being regularly extended, horizontally via site acquisition or vertically with extra storeys, establishing a pattern that continued throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty first. Within the Square Mile, with its particular concern for the past, replication of the existing architecture has long been the default approach for such projects. The results are sometimes apparent, even as a programme scrupulously follows the Classical orders, and sometimes not – here a single façade that actually dates from before and after the war, revealed only by a subtle lightening of tone between the two.
I think both of these projects (by the same practice, co-incidentally) work well, but in other contexts respect for that existing architecture can be better shown by difference rather than deference. The overripe confection about to be dropped on top of an acclaimed but unsuspecting building near Liverpool Street station demonstrates this only too well.
The elegant stone palazzo of Winchester House at the eastern end of London Wall was built as the British head office of Deutsche Bank and opened just before the Millenium. It housed cellular offices, conference rooms, executive suites and three trading floors and was designed by David Walker of American practice Swanke Hayden Connell Architects. I’ve toured the building and have known David for fifteen years; he explained the philosophy behind its distinctive design to me in a series of conversations some time ago.
The “gentle sweep” of the main London Wall façade responds to the church opposite, with further “streamlining” employed for a more sophisticated look overall. The “punched nature of the windows” with their flush glazing and attendant detailing appears simple but forms the basis of a carefully considered articulation deployed across the building. Important moments include the “little townhouse façades” on the Great Winchester Street elevation, whose more broken massing reflects that of the buildings across that road, and the corner client entrance – originally unglazed and open to the street – featuring works from the bank’s large contemporary art collection. All of this combined to ensure Winchester House spoke with “a fresh modern language” in the City streets, one that was specifically urban, addressed an intricate grain and projected weight and solidity. It is to my mind one of the most notable City buildings of the period.
But Deutsche Bank moved out this year, leaving Winchester House to new owners Castleforge who promise to “enhance the existing building […] while safeguarding the architectural significance of the original structure and façade” via a scheme by their architects Orms. This involves a reshaping of the lower levels, recladding the bridge wing that links Winchester House to the former home of Morgan Grenfell (which Deutsche Bank had, at the time, recently taken over) and – most disturbingly – burdening the building with several extra storeys in “stone faced precast”, “precast concrete” and, at the summit, “metal”.
I do like almost all of those ground floor proposals, including brightening the London Wall retail units and especially the opening up of the main entrance into a passage through the block to Great Winchester Street; I must admit I'd never realised Austin Friars Passage, beyond it, cuts through as far as this street so I can see the logic for ‘Prior's Court’ as the new alley has been dubbed. And a new 'garden' – how times change from the ultra-private client entrance this space once was. Cladding the bridge link with terracotta so that it reads as a standalone (and skinny) block feels inappropriate, though, both in materiality and articulation – the pilasters at the top, for example.
But my biggest concern is the proposal to “grow the building” in tiers using that over-rich menu of materials. Far from allowing the completed scheme “to be perceived as one and not simply as an extension”, it looks to me like pastiche, a tottering Post-Modernist wedding cake that entirely fails to respect the horizontality or austere urbanity of Walker’s design.
This process of lending the building a voice is understandably difficult if the original designer is not available, but that isn’t a problem at Winchester House. Indeed Orms spoke to Walker about his design and clearly understand it, producing an excellent document set that has shown me details I hadn't appreciated before. But he did not assist beyond that and theirs is the wrong solution. In fact whilst the scheme currently on site is not Walker's (his blunt assessment of what is inspired my title), he did work up an alternative, shown here exclusively in an image obtained by morphing an old photograph of the original model with a CGI model of his new concept.
Here the new meets the old but in full concordance with the principle that each should be distinguishably of its time and type. It's much better. The new element is a kind of inversion of the original, and I like the 'floating' feeling – it would look impressive by night, hovering above the earlier building as a glazed box above a solid base. Anton Stankowski is responsible for Deutsche Bank’s logo, an oblique held but not corralled within a square. He called his design, which dates from 1974, “dynamic, ascending and secure. A security within a certain space, in which percentages fluctuate.” It isn’t too much of a stretch to see something of this in David’s suggestion.
The Castleforge scheme was granted planning approval under delegated powers so there was no public committee vote and the opportunity to affect it has passed. It is, though, “a shame” according to David who feels “it would be worth lamenting” the loss of his project in its intended form. I’ve been more than happy to do that in this post, and can only hope that wiser counsels prevail when other buildings of the quality and originality of Winchester House come up for consideration.
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