The Stirling prize should honour housing, not exorbitant offices
The Bloomberg HQ is hardly representative of most UK building projects, writes
Work on the new European headquarters of Bloomberg in London, which was announced as the winner of the 2018 Stirling Prize for Architecture earlier this week, started more than 10 years ago. Recent comments by the eponymous founder of the global financial information company suggest it is a good thing it did.
Asked if he would still have built the building had he known that the UK would quit the European Union, Michael Bloomberg conceded: “I’ve had some thoughts that maybe I wouldn’t have, but we are there and we are going to be very happy.”
Let’s hope he is right, as the project, which is the work of Norman Foster’s practice, Foster + Partners, represents an investment of more than £1 billion. At 1.1 million square feet it is one of the largest office buildings in London and the most expensive by some distance.
There is much to admire, and yet the decision to award such an exceptionally lavish project a prize that aims to recognise “the building that has made the greatest contribution to the evolution of architecture in the past year” is certain to be questioned. Given that its budget comfortably exceeds that of every other project on the shortlist combined, the Bloomberg headquarters hardly represents a model likely to be replicated soon.
In a year when the housing crisis has rarely been out of the headlines, the fact that the sole residential project in the running was Henley Halebrown architects’ fine student halls at the University of Roehampton feels like a particularly glaring oversight.
This is the third occasion on which Foster + Partners has clinched the Stirling. The last time was in 2004, for 30 St Mary Axe, better known as The Gherkin, which is just a five-minute walk from the Bloomberg HQ.
You would struggle to guess that the two buildings were the work of the same architect. With its wraparound glazing and curvaceous geometry, the 41-storey Gherkin presents an
Shockingly, in its 22-year history the Stirling has only once been awarded to a housing scheme
imperious disdain for the materials, grain and scale of the historic City. The Bloomberg HQ is, in comparison, a work of fastidious contextualism. At just eight storeys, it is much more closely related to the height of the City of London’s pre-20th-century fabric.
It also makes efforts to repair the damage wreaked by the pair of Fifties towers that previously occupied its plot. Their construction eradicated a Roman road and also involved the relocation of the Temple of Mithras, one of London’s most significant Roman remains. Foster + Partners has reestablished the thoroughfare in the form of a double-height retail arcade that cuts a diagonal course through the new building. It has also returned the temple to its original location.
Foster + Partners’s work over the past five decades has all but invariably been rooted in the use of exposed steel and large expanses of glass. It comes as no small surprise to find that the Bloomberg elevations are dominated by a frame of Derbyshire sandstone, interspersed by monumental bronze fins. These incorporate flaps that automatically open to draw fresh air into the deep interior which is naturally extracted by vents at the top of a dramatic, top-lit atrium. This technology is key to an environmental strategy that has led to claims that the building is the world’s most sustainable office block. The generous provision of social spaces for its 4,000 occupants represents another departure from the corporate norm.
Nevertheless, the Bloomberg HQ remains the latest in a line of Stirling winners unrepresentative of the architectural commissions that make up the bulk of our built environment. Shockingly, in its 22-year history the Stirling has only once been awarded to a housing scheme.
Doubtless that reflects the dismal quality of so many homes that have been built in these years, but if future juries really want to contribute to the evolution of British architecture, they would do well to dig a little deeper.