Photo credit @Chris Rogers
“It’s a building we designed. We’re proud of it. So proud, we moved in!” It was a punchy and positive start as Ed Williams, managing partner of Fletcher Priest Architects (FPA), welcomed TLS members last month to 100 Fetter Lane. Completed a year ago just inside the Square Mile where the legal quarter of Holborn blurs into the financial district proper, the building would be our introduction to the demands, constraints and pleasures of designing in the City today and the working methods of a practice embracing all three. That several awards and brisk lettings have accompanied FPA’s own occupancy suggested we were in for a fascinating evening.
Of course one might reasonably ask when sitting in the cosy café at the base of a new building why was it built at all when ‘retrofit first’ is the contemporary cry. Ed had two answers to that question. The first is that refurbishment didn’t make much sense when the existing post-war blocks were examined closely; the second is the inescapable fact that a commercial building simply needs more space than those low-rise structures could provide. With client YardNine and BauMont Capital agreeing, the challenge was to create a taller replacement that satisfied business imperatives yet gave something back to its corner-site context.
Arranging a building as sections that vary in size or shape is one way to achieve this, an approach called massing. Here it allows the new building to reach 12 storeys in height on Fetter Lane to the east, answering the emerging scale of New Street Square across the road, but then diminish in stages to the west where it meets a former churchyard. As Ed explained, this also yields a variety of floor sizes to suit different tenants and a series of terraces for them that feature “pockets, gardens and greenery.”
Varying the materials also changes the way we notice or ‘read’ these sections. Pale grey concrete for that western portion is quiet and “more respectful” to the listed Yorke Rosenberg Mardall building from 1961 that sits at the rear of the churchyard, clad in the firm’s signature white tiles. Around the corner, warm tones of brown and red aggregate – “as natural as you can get without artificial colours” – stripe the main elevation, nodding to other neighbours. All of this concrete is pre-cast and roughly-tooled, emulating the historic technique of rustication. To the north, tucked in to an internal corner of the site, a section of intermediate height in a third colour and a very different finish denotes a re-sited pub that has been treated, Ed says, as “a ghost object.”
Inspired by artist Rachel Whiteread’s casts of rooms and even entire façades, the pattern of the old pub’s door and windows has been reproduced but inverted, the solid areas sheathed in glazed blue faience. Small raised motifs, like those you might have seen on certain tube platforms and “just about affordable”, call out the literary and printing history of the area. It’s a witty move that will enliven your next pub chat, wherever it take place.
Enlivening the surrounding streets in this way has been complemented by a new route through the plot that features a little landscaping, bicycle and end-of-route facilities at ground level and the café where we began our tour. Proving that not everything has to be planned, FPA decided fairly late in the day to make this their front door (the actual building entrance is on the corner) and incorporated a gallery displaying models and life-sized components as a kind of physical calling card that can be examined over a flat white.
Moving up to the floors that still await an occupier, we were struck by some of the other factors that drive take up in the office market. The views are tremendous, of course, both in themselves and when adding the important ‘I never realised that’ quality to the experience of seeing a familiar city from a new vantage point. The architectural difference between those two areas 100 Fetter Lane straddles – the capitals of Charles Dickens and Andrew Bailey, as it were – is also clearer from on high. The demarcation is now one of roofscapes, with intricate turrets and spires visible in one direction and blocky glass wedges dominating the other.
Inside, those deeply-sliced concrete pieces provide shade and privacy, whilst 3.4 metre high ceilings, floor-level air introduction and openable windows deliver a healthier mix of natural and conditioned air for enhanced wellbeing. Rather harder to see are the contributions toward reducing embodied carbon at Fetter Lane, so the explanations of the efforts and achievements here were instructive. The extremely careful specification and management of materials has been key, in a pioneering approach that was a collaboration with engineers Watermans and part of the evolving discipline of materials passporting. It was set out in more detail by Joanna Wilson, FPA’s sustainability lead.
Knowing as much as is practical about every item used in construction allows multiple benefits. Architects can work with suppliers to minimise unwanted qualities and maximise those which benefit a project, contractors can better control installation and everyone can re-use components more easily when the time comes. Around 5,000 separate elements were logged, amounting to about 80% of the building, tracked by QR codes for accessibility. As an example, that concrete cladding has a design life of 120 years and bolted attachment eases removal or replacement. Awareness of both will pay dividends and contrasts with a discussion I had later with Jo and fellow attendees about the difficulties of taking steel beams and columns from an old building for use on a new one and the practice’s experiments with another building that it did not design but whose parts it is trying to upcycle.
From the literal to the virtual; an illustrated presentation by Tristan Taylor of the methods FPA uses to engage with its audiences concluded our visit. A fun, zoomable digital model of London was a cross between the distinctive styles of Dorling Kindersley and Where’s Wally, whilst infographics and animation are also employed when needed. This childhood Airfixer was however pleased to hear that physical models are still the most effective way of communicating with many people, whether the public or developers.
Architecture is arguably the most important of all the arts – you can ignore a play, stay away from a gallery and even turn off your television set, but unless you live in a cave you should care about the buildings being erected around you. Having even a few hours’ insight into what that takes is valuable, and this was an excellent, well-managed tour that did exactly that.
Written by: Chris Rogers
With thanks to Ed, Jo, Tristan, Joe Sweeney and Shafia Motaleb at FPA, and Jenny Adler-Potts at TLS. Future Meet the Architects events can be found here
Chris writes, speaks and creates tours about architecture and other aspects of visual culture; find him at www.chrismrogers.net
Photo credit @Chris Rogers