Lloyd's Building Building Sights

BBC Four Collections - archive

programmes chosen by experts.

For this Collection, Janet Street-Porter has selected

programmes about post-war architecture.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four Collections are available on BBC iPlayer.

This building has achieved a unique position

in contemporary British architecture.

It has become a symbol of contemporary life,

style and technology.

An icon, instantly familiar.

It has entered the popular imagination,

the realm of shared fantasy

where fact and fiction dissolve into one another.

It is a strange mixture of assertion and enigma.

One catches glimpses of it from different places all over London,

yet one rarely sees it in full.

Although the Lloyd's building is constantly photographed and filmed,

its status as icon has overshadowed its character as

object.

I'm interested in its visual and physical appearance -

the way every detail reveals its rigorous intellectual clarity.

This is a very radical building.

The seemingly windowless exterior

is made almost entirely

of stainless

steel.

Masses of silver tubes and funnels rise from the ground.

Stacks of identical units all draw the eye upward

to the complex crown of the building.

These are the essential facilities of the building

-

the heating

and air-conditioning ducts,

the electric and telephone cabling,

the lifts, toilets, staircases.

Instead of hiding them at the heart of the building

like an embarrassment, as is the normal practice,

Rogers parades them around its perimeter.

He uses them to establish a language of design.

He takes these given elements and

articulates them

to establish scale, rhythm, detail.

He doesn't need to introduce design elements

such as columns and

pediments.

This is not the surface

pseudo-architecture of graphic design.

Lloyd's is a truly classical building,

a great modernist experience of space.

Going to the root of the building, to the hidden service basements,

we find the source of these ducts and tubes

and the logic of this great machine-like building is clear.

Giant heating and cooling units, massive generators

and rooms of batteries to keep the computers going.

The world can fail, but Lloyd's can continue insuring for ever.

One proceeds quite deep into the heart of the building

before actually entering it.

For such an assertive building,

the entrance is comparatively modest, low.

A place of transition before entering the grandeur of the interior space.

The sight is fabulous, breathtaking.

Across an ocean of dark blue carpet is a gleaming

white marble

rectangle.

Above it rises the whole 12-storey building, open at the centre,

right up to a clear glass arch onto the sky.

A cascade of escalators, their sides transparent,

lit from inside,

provide a constant flow of movement.

Most modern buildings are comparatively simple on the exterior

but become confused and anonymous on the inside.

By contrast, the comparative complexity of the Lloyd's building

on the outside gives way to a highly

graspable simplicity on the inside.

In fact, the whole interior is a single, vast room.

Just as when one walks into the Sistine Chapel and looks up,

one's eye is able to take in the order of the whole space in seconds.

One looks up and says, "My God, it's so simple!"

The ornate wooden rostrum housing the Lutine bell

acts as a striking focal point at the base of the great central void.

It is this void which orients one wherever one is in the building.

Locating the services on the outside has allowed completely open floors,

free to take the clutter of hundreds of underwriters.

As the business expands,

more and more floors can be given over to the markets' use.

This is a dream, being able to possess the whole building like this,

empty, being able to look at it so closely.

But, of course, it's not how the building normally functions

or how it really looks.

The effect when the building is filled with busy people

is intensely theatrical,

with the users functioning as both actors and audience.

Far from cold and impersonal, the building is animated by its occupants

in a celebration of the business it houses.

To travel to the upper floors, one leaves the main body of the building,

crossing glass bridges that afford glimpses of the outside world,

and proceeds to the lift towers.

The glass lifts allows sweeping views of the stainless-steel exterior

and the complex vitality of the surrounding cityscape.

Everything in the building has

been designed with consistent attention and detail.

The standard of craftsmanship and materials

is of the very highest quality.

Even the smallest detail of these handrails

reveals the logic of the whole building.

The 11th and 12th floors - the executive floors -

were commissioned from another design team, not from Rogers.

The result is conventionally executive and sadly disappointing.

The unity and integrity of the whole design is lost.

Just look at this handrail

in comparison with the others.

It could come from any London wine bar.

But this floor does hold a real surprise...

This room, with its original Adam fireplace,

was moved from Bowood House in

Wiltshire to the old Lloyd's.

Rogers incorporated it into the new building,

placing it here on the executive floors.

The shock of abruptly entering such an entirely different world

is a dramatic example of Rogers' attitude towards other styles

and periods of architecture.

He allows each its full integrity.

He refuses compromised reasonableness.

One sees this attitude again

in the relationship of Lloyd's to its neighbours.

Far from indifferent to them, it emphasises by distinction

their differences of style and material,

enhancing the contrasts of historical and visual complexity

that make cities exciting.

Rogers honours the past by his

pride and confidence in the present.

The problem for architects today is the same as it has always been -

how to respond to contemporary needs

with contemporary sensibility and contemporary technology.

This is the only modern building in London

that's really captured my imagination.

Great buildings always give me a special kind of pleasure

and,

as an artist, a mixture of jealous admiration and vicarious pride.