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Breathing room: Arup's new London
headquarters celebrates its mechanical systems
By David Gissen
In today’s era of sick-building
syndrome and fears of SARS outbreaks and bioterrorist attacks,
most architects and engineers strive to obscure a building’s
mechanical systems, or at least place the necessary equipment
out of harm’s way. But architect Sheppard Robson and
the engineers of Arup have done just the opposite at the Fitzrovia
Building, the latter’s newly designed, 125,000-square-foot
headquarters in London, which boldly displays the innards
of its HVAC system. In so doing, the design team has created
an alluring new relationship between architecture, engineering,
and urban space—one that negotiates the complex role
of air-handling technologies in an age of environmental and
security concerns.
Over the past 50 years, Arup has expanded
its operations to include numerous buildings in and around
the Fitzroy Street area of London, just north and west of
the heart of Bloomsbury. The collection of buildings, dubbed
the “Fitzrovia Estate,” was a sprawling aggregation
of structures with few physical connections. In March 2001,
Arup, Sheppard Robson, and real estate management firm London
Merchant Securities announced plans to use architecture, small-scale
urban planning, and sustainable engineering to turn the collection
of buildings into a campus for Arup. “The project will
establish a coherent campus that will reflect both externally
and internally what Arup stands for. It will provide an exciting
and inspirational workplace to support and encourage the firm’s
philosophy of creativity and innovation,” said Arup officials
at the project’s onset. The Fitzrovia Building is the
first step in this plan.
Turning HVAC inside out Sheppard Robson
and Arup used the distribution of air and light as a leitmotif
in bringing together two seven-story, 1960s-era office blocks
that constitute the new building. It now reads as a unified
ensemble, laced together with pronounced ductwork, a dramatic
double-glazed curtain wall, and a standout component: a lozenge-shaped
element, called “the hub,” which forms the locus
of a unique air-delivery system for the complex.
In the existing buildings, low floor-to-ceiling
heights precluded the use of underfloor air distribution for
heating and cooling, an energy-saving strategy that Arup pioneered
years ago. Instead, the engineers mounted air-handling ducts
on the exterior of the building, in a clearly visible space
within the cavity of a double-glazed curtain wall. Solar-shading
louvers are also installed between the glazed faces of this
curtain wall to reduce heat gain within the complex. The windows
facing Fitzroy Street are operable to encourage natural ventilation,
whereas those that look out on the warmer, south-facing Howland
Street are fixed, and the HVAC ducts in this area more protected
in the plenum space between the double glazing. A computerized
building management system (BMS) controls the entire operation,
maintaining comfortable indoor temperatures while also balancing
energy consumption. Though the double glazing, louvered shading
devices, and BMS are common features in Europe’s energy-conscious
architecture, this project’s brazen display of its HVAC
equipment makes it exceptional.
The hub, a mixing chamber and circulation
space for both people and incoming air, is clad inside and
out with bright-green composite panels manufactured in Germany.
The panels splay and peel open haphazardly, distorting the
hub’s egglike form and providing areas for air entry
and exit through the gaps between the panels and into the
exterior ductwork. Originally, this part of the building was
to be clad in copper panels, but the matte-plastic skin actually
harmonizes better with the rest of the building’s palette
of industrial materials.
From outside, the hub appears as a distorted
technological element, cracked and warped for the provision
of air. Inside, its green skin partially encloses gathering
areas for Arup’s employees to use as informal breakout
and meeting space, as well as for public functions.
As technically proficient as it is visually
contemplative, Sheppard Robson and Arup have created at the
Fitzrovia Building a compelling essay on air and urbanism.
The ducts sealed within the double-glazed wall, along with
the fractured geometries of the hub, seem to suggest the uncertain
contemporary aesthetics of expressing how building systems
work. On the one hand, these systems make buildings habitable
and (in the best cases) more comfortable; on the other hand,
they can serve as a vector for causing harm to occupants,
whether intentionally or not. While a powerful form, the hub
invokes a far more hesitant image of this machinery than late-Modernist
works such as the 1984 Lloyds Building of London by Richard
Rogers, or his earlier Pompidou Center in Paris, completed
with Renzo Piano in 1977. Both these buildings were also engineered
by Arup, and may have been the “last gasp” (so to
speak) of a purely technological building language rooted
in Archigramian aesthetics. Today, the architectural expression
of these systems faces a far more tentative future, when so
much concern has been raised about their gluttonous energy
consumption, their vulnerability to attack, and the difficult
maintenance and air-quality issues they entail. It’s
into this unique historical moment that the new Arup headquarters
exhales an audible, striking sigh.
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