Over the last 100 years, buildings have increasingly expressed the previously hidden ducts and services cores that help them function: a trend epitomised by Rogers Stirk Harbour+Partners’ 88 Wood Street in London.
The services plugging into or flowing out of a building and their coordination have become an increasingly key element, and sometime generator, of architectural design. Indeed buildings could be characterised as primarily organs that utilise, convert or direct the vascular flow of services into usable functions or new forms.
And throughout the 20th Century, architects grappled with the problem of how to deal with the growing tsunami of different services hitting their buildings: the new need to accommodate the flow of all the different mediums of gas, electricity and data around the structure, in addition to accommodating and sheltering the physical movement and daily routine of people themselves.
Early attempts to hide or disguise services as traditional architectural elements gave way, with the advent of modernism, to their polemical expression – ‘house as machine for living in’ and all that – although this so-called ‘functionalism’ was often in practice more symbolic than literal. A key trope became the use of glass, supposedly democratising space through transparency: allowing the breakdown of old hierarchies between served and servant, or service and spaces. This led to the foregrounding, even celebration, of building mechanics and functions, as a key design generator in architecture, notably with the High-Tech movement of the 1970s.
88 Wood Street by Rogers Stirk Harbour+Partners is a sophisticated late-twentieth century expression of this trend. An office building, rising progressively from eight to eighteen stories, the ‘neutrality’ of its in-situ concrete floor plates are ringed with lightweight, steel-frame service towers, pulled-out and expressed, containing the toilets, service ducts, lifts and fully glazed stairwells. These are further emphasised by brightly coloured vertical elements, their colours echoed in the boldly hued air intakes and extracts at street level. On their website, RSH+P sum up the guiding principle behind this building’s design, as: ‘transparency allowing a startling level of legibility of its technology and constituent parts.’
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