The city in the city – architecture and change in London’s financial district

Planning Perspectives · 2025-06-26

Parcel, Bubble, Shell: The Insular Environment of Finance

Architectural Theory Review · 2022

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economy

This article explores how the design of an insurance brokerage for Willis Faber & Dumas by Foster Associates architects meticulously accommodate an increasingly constricted financial sphere. It analyzes links between privatization and delimitation across various scales: from material and spatial implications within the building, to its role in urban development schemes, to the intersection of domestic social and economic policies with international finance. The analysis centers on the local spatial implications of the United Kingdom’s transition in the 1970s away from a social democratic system that privileged industrial labor and manufactured goods, toward becoming an international center for the transaction of “invisibles” within a global financial market. The architects of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters described an “interiorized” architecture, with a diaphanous mirrored glass envelope maximizing views to the outside world while intensifying an inward focus. This paradigm of enclosure produced a model of internality particular to the outward expansion of capital.

The Value of Enclosure and the Business of Banking

Grey Room · 2018-06-01 · 2 citations

June 01 2018 The Value of Enclosure and the Business of Banking Alexandra Quantrill Alexandra Quantrill Alexandra Quantrill received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2017, with a dissertation titled “The Aesthetics of Precision: Environmental Management and Technique in the Architecture of Enclosure, 1946–1986.” She currently teaches at Parsons School of Design. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Alexandra Quantrill Alexandra Quantrill received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2017, with a dissertation titled “The Aesthetics of Precision: Environmental Management and Technique in the Architecture of Enclosure, 1946–1986.” She currently teaches at Parsons School of Design. Online Issn: 1536-0105 Print Issn: 1526-3819 © 2018 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2018Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Grey Room (2018) (71): 116–137. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00244 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Alexandra Quantrill; The Value of Enclosure and the Business of Banking. Grey Room 2018; (71): 116–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00244 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsGrey Room Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2018 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2018Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Aesthetics of Precision: Environmental Management and Technique in the Architecture of Enclosure, 1946-1986

Columbia Academic Commons (Columbia University) · 2017-01-01

This dissertation explores the paradox of precision in postwar architecture, when dissonant aesthetic desires and concerns regarding environmental regulation forced a reconciliation of material techniques with theoretical accuracy. The modern ideal of exactitude was frequently at odds with the divergent processes of building research, engineering, manufacturing, and environmental management. Suspended within the strata of newly developed curtain walls was a suddenly critical technical and architectural problem: how to achieve the kind of modulated environment implied by the highly regulated lines and taut materiality of the glazed envelope. Unlike outwardly legible structural systems, typically celebrated as modernism’s heroic force, techniques of enclosure defined modern interior atmospheres. Precision was key to demarcating the interior environment, and architects relied upon the burgeoning building products industry for research on the most advanced techniques in glazing, component assembly, solar control, sealants, air-conditioning systems, and weathering protection. The dissertation is structured as four case studies of enclosure details from buildings accommodating diplomacy, industrial production, risk management, and global financial operations: the United Nations Secretariat building (1952), two factory buildings for the Cummins Engine Company (1966 and 1975), the headquarters of insurance broker Willis, Faber & Dumas (1975), and the headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (1986). While the research centers on fragments of much larger building projects, the analysis of particular enclosures unfolds to address the spatial reverberations of progressive societal shifts over the period, from internationalized conceptions of architecture and statecraft following the Second World War, through western corporate growth and global expansion during the 1960s and 1970s, to the emergence of a neoliberal economic regime inflecting the formation of corporate space during the 1970s and 1980s. The details scrutinized here delineate interiors that operate as microcosms mirroring global social and economic circumstances.

Review: <i>How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?</i>, by Norberto Lopez Amado and Carlos Carcas, directors

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2013-02-26

Norberto Lopez Amado and Carlos Carcas, directors How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? Art Commissioners in association with Aiete Ariane Films, First Run Features, New York, 2010, DVD, 80 min., $20.96, http://firstrunfeatures.com/ In the years surrounding the 1967 establishment of the Foster Associates office (now Foster + Partners) in London by Norman Foster with his late wife and partner, Wendy Foster, the discourse on systems in architecture gained prominence both in the United States, where Foster had been a graduate student at Yale, and in Europe.1 Especially prominent in Britain was the “systems-built” model, emphasizing industrialized production, prefabricated elements, and speed of the construction process. Figures such as Foster, Richard Rogers, and Nicholas Grimshaw advocated increased performance, an ideal that was intimately linked to this notion of systematized production, and could be understood in terms of energy efficiency. Lightweight, modular components would lead to ease of assembly and reduced material expenditure. Advanced environmental controls systems would enhance comfort while minimizing energy consumption. The 2010 documentary on Norman Foster’s life and work, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? , draws its title from Buckminster Fuller’s favorite question to architects, purportedly posed to Foster during a visit to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, completed in 1978. Implicit in the inquiry was Fuller’s call for more efficient use of material resources as part of a larger energy conservation strategy, and Foster claims he spent the next week coming up with the answer: 5,328 tons. This exercise clearly influenced Foster’s thinking, and the documentary includes footage of a 1980 client presentation in which he compares a mockup of a lightweight polycarbonate sandwich panel only a few inches thick to a 3-foot-thick brick wall, a 9-inch concrete wall with an air cavity, and a multilayered brick wall, concluding that the minimal sandwich panel performs equally as well as the other wall types. Foster asserts in the film: “Technology is the art of making things and high technology is performance.” Regrettably, the documentary largely …