Retrospective Futures 2

Above: Study for the Golden Square elevation of the entry for the British Steel ideas competition for a headquarters building for information technologists, 1989.

Preface

I realised that a good many of my degree and diploma level projects had plenty of future thinking into the issues surrounding sustainability and the built environment. I thought the material was worthy of dusting off, digitising and celebrating as a series of retrospective future thinking posts for the Sustainababble blog. This project from 1989 challenged the notion of the daily commute and foresaw the energy saving and quality of life improving benefits of teleworking.

Above: 1:100 scale vertical section through the competition entry for a headquarters building for information technologists. 1989

Headquarters Building for Information Technologists, Golden Square, London, 1989

My third-year thesis project was an entry for the British Steel competition for a Headquarters Building for Information Technologists. The site was Golden Square in London and it had a well-considered brief with a fully worked-out schedule of accommodation. Our tutors pushed us off to study celebrated case studies like Lasdun’s HQ for the Royal College of Physicians or Wornum’s HQ for the Royal Institute of British Architects. My preoccupations though were more concerned with lowering environmental impact.

In 1989 it felt like a whole new era was about to unfold – the Information Age. Why then, I asked, did the headquarters building need so much office space in the brief of accommodation? Surely information technology could allow much of the staff to work remotely from home. Along with the notion that the building itself should be a veritable power station of renewable energy, my entry was based on the premise that it had next to no office accommodation because all the staff could telework. Instead, it would be a social and ceremonial hub, a vast I.T. database and all coalesced into a dramatic internal and external set of spaces which would invite the public into the workings of this new institute.

Above: Development sketch of ideas for power tower rising high above the infill site. Coined a ‘sky harvester’, stacks of vertical wind turbines would capture ambient energies from the atmosphere.

On the one hand the architectural concept was all about making the building into a renewable energy power station whereas the more fundamental questioning of the commuting lifestyle suggested that far greater energy saving potentials were possible by looking beyond the building’s envelope and gadgets of energy generation and into the realms of planet-friendly live/work strategies.

This project has particular resonance for me as it informed many of the projects, I would go on to speculate on through my BBM years, like Cityvision and Comstation which were all hypothetical. That notion that we should move away from lifestyles so reliant on stupendous levels of transport mobility also found traction in BBM’s first built project back in 1993 / 94 with Futurehouse with its dedicated homeworking space and a few years thereafter coming up with some of the competition winning ideas behind the Greenwich Millennium Village, working alongside HTA Architects and Ralph Erskine. During the initial Covid outbreak of May 2020 it also formed the basis of my revamp of Cityvision in a RIBA Journal competition entry entitled, Teleworking Cities of Tomorrow. In many ways, the ideas have now come to pass and remote working and less commuting is for many of us now a reality.