Modern icon: the Lloyds Building
The Lloyds Building is one of those buildings that define an epoch. More than any other building in London, perhaps, it marks the shift from “we-know-what-a-building-is” architectural literalism (four walls and a roof) to imaginative deconstruction.
Like Richard Rogers’ other controversial “inside-out” building, the Beaubourg Centre in Paris, it wears its guts on the outside, with the transparent lift shafts running up the side of the building – as well as services shafts which contain water pipes and electric cables. The predominant use of metal and glass, the service shafts separate from the core of the building, are fairly common techniques nowadays – but they weren’t in 1978 when work on the building started.
And yet at its very core this building has a secret – an eighteenth century dining room, designed by the great architect Robert Adam. Laboriously, piece by piece, it was transferred from the old (1950s) Lloyds Building to the new – a typical instance of the way London has never made a revolutionary break with the past, but found a way of including it in modern life. It’s an intriguing secret and I rather wonder whether it should have made it into Neverwhere, or into one of Alan Moore’s graphic novels, or perhaps into Peter Ackroyd’s marvellous psycho-geographico-thriller Hawksmoor.
I’ve always loved this building.It’s a terrific character, with its snail-like coiled corner turrets, its vertical aspiration and its gleam. It’s even better at night when it shines electric blue. Definitely a modern icon of London, in my book.
Photo credit – Steve Cadman on Flickr
Comments Off