Taiwan’s largest airport, Taoyuan International Airport, has opened its North Concourse, providing eight new gates for its busy Terminal 3. The project, which is set to welcome 5.8 million passengers a year, was led by the London-based architecture firm RSHP, which designed the new expansion at the world’s 11th busiest airport.

Inside Taoyuan International Airport's new terminal gates

Located in Dayuan, Taoyuan International Airport is around 40km west of Taipei. The expansion was completed while the airport remained fully operational, and marks the start of further ambitions for Terminal 3.

RSHP delivered a clear design language, fluid and dynamic, which can be adapted as the area expands in the future. The eight new gates (which extend from D10 to D18) are generous in width and offer long, clear sightlines to allow for smooth, pleasant and efficient travel.

The colour palette is a mix of yellow, orange and burgundy, and you progress from one hue to another as you move along the concourse, allowing for easy gate identification. The silver façade, designed to control glare and heat, allows natural light to shine through the double-height space, offering views across the airfield.

The building's structure helps form a variety of internal volumes through the use of different ceiling heights. This creates a wave-like visual effect when travelling through its spaces. The bespoke halo light fittings animate the ceilings. The final touch is the 300m length of public artworks, nodding to Taiwanese culture.

Terminal 3’s next phase will include the completion of the hard-shell roof, which is inspired by Taiwan’s cloud-capped mountains. Its undulating surface will be studded with luminous pendants. Currently, the ceiling is undergoing a series of in-situ lighting tests to explore the concept's full capability and how this will enhance the space below.

‘RSHP has succeeded in designing a terminal that responds holistically to the evolving needs of passengers, the airport, and the emerging aerotropolis,’ says Andrew Tyley, director of RSHP. ‘It is a defining project that repositions Taoyuan as a global gateway and sets a new benchmark for airport architecture in the region.’

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The first sneak peek inside Regent's View, the RSHP-designed redevelopment of a tricky industrial site by the canal near Broadway Market in east London, brings the highly anticipated scheme one step closer towards completion.

The project, a mixed-use scheme for St William (part of the Berkeley Group), has a difficult balance to achieve. It has to provide new homes for a demanding, design-savvy clientele (likely a mix of locals looking to upgrade and London enthusiasts after a bolthole in the UK capital); create a sense of place out of a site which has long been underused and impenetrable to the public; and ensure the large chunk of land it occupies weaves seamlessly into its much loved, lived in, east London surroundings. Not an easy feat, perhaps, for a newly built project – yet one which the architects at RSHP took on with enthusiasm.

Tour the apartments at Regent's View

The relatively large-scale project occupies the site of a long-decommissioned set of large Victorian gasholders, and will comprise five volumes (two within the refurbished gasholder structures, and three entirely new ones) and an open green park for both residents and the wider local community to enjoy. Retail spaces on the ground level will add amenities to the neighbourhood, and a part of the canalside walk, previously closed off to the public, will now be accessible to all. The wider development is set to add 555 new homes to the area – some privately owned, some affordable, in a mix of rentals and apartments for sale.

The Wright Building is the first of the five residential buildings on the 4.5-acre site to complete – and visitors were allowed in for a first tour this week. A range of apartments, from one- to three-bedrooms, are available to experience, featuring interiors by studio MAWD.

Different apartment typologies ensure character-rich layouts and lots of outdoor space, which lends a sense of place and identity to the interiors. Balconies, which are set back into the façade, not only maintain the building's overall circular-inspired shape but also protect the outdoor areas from excess sun or rain, depending on the season, while offering long vistas of typical London skylines – including the City and Canary Wharf.

Craig Miles, managing director at St William, said at the launch: 'The completion of the first buildings at Regent’s View is a major milestone and exciting next step for the development. With our first residents soon to follow and the painstakingly restored gasholders in the process of being reinstalled, our vision for this iconic site is coming to fruition. Our first in-situ show homes perfectly encapsulate how life in the development could look for future residents.'

Regent's View's Wright Building is welcoming residents from November 2025, while the next phase, the Westwood Building, is due to be completed in spring 2026

berkeleygroup.co.uk

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Richard Rogers is an undisputed occupant of the architectural hall of fame. The British-Italian architect, renowned for his high-tech designs, left an indelible mark on cities around the world with his buildings, which include the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Lloyds Building in London, and London’s Millennium Dome. As the founder of firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (now RSHP, previously Richard Rogers Partnership), Rogers championed a style defined by exposed structural elements.

Now, a major retrospective celebrating his career is coming to London. ‘Richard Rogers: Talking Buildings’ will be showing at Sir John Soane’s Museum from June 18-September 21 2025. Curated by his son, Ab Rogers, the exhibition spotlights eight of Rogers’ most significant projects, dating from 1967 to 2020. ‘Each scheme is displayed and deconstructed through large format drawings, models and moving imagery, directing particular focus to Rogers’ way of working [and] communicating his singular vision,’ explains Will Gompertz, director of Sir John Soane’s.

The journey begins with the Zip-Up House, an unbuilt concept designed for a competition for innovation in domestic architecture. It imagined a modular, prefabricated home free from the constraints of traditional construction – ideas that would later find tangible form in the Rogers House, built in Wimbledon, London, in 1967. This is another focus of ‘Talking Buildings’: a lightweight, modernist structure created for the architect’s parents, and awarded Grade II* listed status in 2013.

Naturally, the exhibition delves into Rogers’ best-known work: the Centre Pompidou in Paris, designed in collaboration with Italian architect Renzo Piano. Completed in 1977, the building revolutionised museum architecture with its exuberant use of exposed, colour-coded mechanical systems – yellow for electricity, green for water, blue for air conditioning. It remains one of the most iconic buildings of the 20th century.

The exhibition concludes with one of Rogers’ final projects: the Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste in France. This structure, located within the Provence sculpture park, is a simple orthogonal rectangle – opaque except for floor-to-ceiling glazing at both ends, which serves to direct the visitor’s gaze to the landscape.

Running in parallel, the Sir John Soane’s Museum’s Foyle Space will host ‘RSHP: Dialogue and Design’, an exhibition showcasing the breadth of Rogers’ practice, including the work of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.

Via the case studies outlined above, ‘Talking Buildings’ paints a portrait of an architect committed to the democratisation of architecture. Specially-commissioned films by Marina Willer explore Rogers’ reflections on his work, as well as his enduring concern with ethics and sustainability in architecture. ‘We wanted to create an experience that explored Richard’s work through the lens of activism and intellectual expression as much architecture,’ says Ab Rogers, ‘revealing him as someone who never stopped developing his social, environmental, ethical and political passions.’

The Regent's View site will be familiar to those of us frequenting the popular canal walk and cafés of east London's Broadway Market and its creative community. Set by the water, in a space previously occupied by a set of large Victorian gasholders, the new residential development currently on site adds a new chapter to the life of the industrial mini-landscape that formed the neighbourhood's backdrop for years – ever since the cylinders, previously belonging to the National Grid, became decommissioned and disused over ten years ago.

Enter developer St William, a division of the Berkeley Group that tackles particular, characterful historical sites, and which engaged with architects RSHP (previously Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners) to reimagine the round entities into a new housing quarter and a publically accessible green park.

Regent’s View: a new life for east London's pair of gasholders

RSHP's design translated the original structure's circular, industrial nature into two generous towers, adding three smaller high rises to craft a modern complex within a green open space. The project, which will offer 555 new homes – some for sale, some for rent, some private and some affordable housing – will comprise about three acres of landscaped waterfront architectural gardens.

Within this composition, the two restored cylinders are set to take pride of place – and rightly so, as they are considered to be among the oldest in the world, dating back to 1866.

The homes include one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, ranging in size from 555 to 1,247 sq ft. Show units have just been unveiled within the nearby Westwood Building and the Wright Building, featuring interior design by luxury specialists MAWD that nods to the industrial nature of the site – blending black finishes, wooden cabinetry, metal details and recycled terrazzo.

Retail will also eventually be spread across the site, while, titled ‘The Frameworks’, a series of amenities for residents will include a 24-hour concierge, a creative studio, co-working space, a lounge, a screening room and a wellness area, including a Peloton Studio.

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A new Richard Rogers exhibition, celebrating the ideas and oeuvre of the late, great architect has just launched at Chateau La Coste in France. The show was not only fittingly created by Ab Rogers, a designer and founder of the London studio Ab Rogers Design as well as the architect’s son; it is also staged at Rogers’ last project, the gravity-defying Drawing Gallery within the French destination’s expansive, leafy estate. 

Richard Rogers exhibition: the architect's work and ideas

The exhibition focuses on ‘Rogers’ buildings as manifestations of his ideas’. It spans ten projects, all pivotal in his career, but not all built – from Zip-Up House (1967-69) and Centre Pompidou (1977) to Industrialized Housing (1992), The Millennium Dome (1999) Tree House (2016), and of course the vessel of the show itself, the Richard Rogers Drawing Gallery (2020). 

A bold approach when it comes to the exhibition design underlines the architect's strong ideas, drawing parallels to his ‘electric personality’. The walls in the single-space gallery pavilion have been painted bright pink. The architect’s own voice is ever present, echoing in the space, as the show includes the film ‘Exposed’, which was commissioned for the Pompidou exhibition that celebrated the building’s 40th anniversary in 2007. 

Ab Rogers says: ‘This is a portrait of a man who never stopped being curious and never wanted to stop learning. His buildings were the physical manifestation of his beliefs, driven by social, environmental, ethical, and political passions.’

'Richard Rogers at the Drawing Gallery' runs 22 October 2023 - 7 January 2024 at Chateau La Coste

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No. 33 Park Row is not only the first residential project in New York City designed by RSHP (formerly Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, and created under the direction of Graham Stirk together with the late Richard Rogers); it is also a boutique new address offering just 30 new homes in a prestigious location, just across from City Hall Park in lower Manhattan. Penthouse 3 within it exudes every bit the glamour and design-led ambition you would expect it to, featuring sophisticated interiors combined with unobstructed, green park views. 

Penthouse 3 at No. 33 Park Row

On the building's beautifully elaborate, distinctive exterior, RSHP's signature copper screen fins dominate, creating a grid and vertical rhythm that lifts the gaze upwards. It is a smart approach adopted by the firm in past projects too. 'One Hyde Park and No. 33 Park Row each face a park to the north and exhibit a similarity in terms of aspiration and quality with carefully composed facades that exhibit a richness of depth, shadow, and texture,' says Stirk. 

This is translated inside into swathes of glazing in a series of structured openings, powerfully punctuated by dark window frames. This draws on the area's industrial past, as the architects worked to reference commercial buildings of Downtown Manhattan's industrial era, such as large openings, utilitarian feel metal details around balconies and terraces, and those distinctive dark steel frames on the façade. 

Penthouse 3's spaciousness and open plan is further accentuated by a double-height living space with a mezzanine. It contains seating areas, kitchen and dining, alongside a study on the top level. This industrial, subtly loft-like aesthetic bridges past and future, through RSHP's unique approach – following on from the studio's past work, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and One Monte Carlo in Monaco. 

The living space in the penthouse is complemented by a range of No. 33 Park Row’s amenities for residents. These include: a fifth-floor indoor/outdoor fitness centre and yoga studio, an outdoor kitchenette and dining area, a 24-hour doorman-attended lobby and concierge, a rooftop terrace, a library, a craft studio, a screening room and bike storage. 

no33parkrow.com 

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As of July 2022, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners will be simply known as RSHP. Wallpaper* covered the original transition from the Richard Rogers Partnership to Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners in 2007, which at the time felt like a pioneering move when few other major practices were bringing other partners into the limelight. Richard Rogers died in 2021 at the age of 88. In his later years, he had stepped back from day-to-day involvement in the firm he founded in 1977, alongside John Young, Marco Goldschmied, and Mike Davies, leaving Ivan Harbour and Graham Stirk to take a more prominent role. And now the firm has transformed again, becoming RSHP.

Back in 2012, Rogers told The Guardian newspaper that the reason for the shift to Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners was because ‘we wanted to avoid the situation where the name of the practice is someone who died 100 years ago. Architecture is a living thing. If I want to leave something to the future, it has to be able to change – but retain something of the ethos that we built up over 50 years.’

That ethos is still very much in place. Ivan Harbour joined the Richard Rogers Partnership in 1985, becoming a director in 1993. ‘Back in 2019 we spoke with Richard about changing the name,’ he recalls, ‘having previously agreed that we’d revisit the practice name after a decade of becoming Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.’

Rogers’ death and the pandemic delayed the change, decided upon to address the office’s burgeoning reputation.

‘Although we were always an international practice, since we became Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the work has changed to become truly global,’ Harbour continues, ‘We’re working in North and South America, Central America, Australia, China, Japan, etc. We took the view that although we don’t like the idea of being a brand, it was actually quite important to have a tag that represents what we are.’

RSHP seemed like a natural progression. It still acknowledges Rogers’ formidable influence, as well as the continued guidance of Harbour and Stirk (another veteran, having joined in 1983), while bringing the stamp of acronymous authority that only initials can provide.

As Graham Stirk points out, ‘We now have 180 employees worldwide with a permanent presence in London, Paris, Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai, Shenzhen and soon New York.’ On the boards are 44 projects, located in 15 countries across five continents. These include urban masterplans in Paris, the Metro system in Melbourne, an HQ tower in China, and the British Library Extension in London.

‘Richard’s enduring legacy was the way the practice is constituted,’ says Harbour. ‘It may even still be unique, because the practice is owned by a charitable trust. That means we only physically own the furniture and computers and equipment, along with a little holiday house [north of] London, designed by Berthold Lubetkin next to Whipsnade Zoo.’

This property, one of two holiday bungalows designed by the émigré Russian architect in 1933, was originally for Lubetkin’s own use (the other was originally owned by pioneering eye surgeon Dame Ida Mann). Today, it is used as a retreat, available for staff to book. The charity also owns the practice’s comprehensive and valuable archive.

This structure has continued to shape the way the practice operates. ‘It was classic Richard in a way – “How can I think about practice in a way that has durability?” The idea of being equitable to everyone, looking after those who are less fortunate and being very family-based, these were ideas that were also super important,’ says Harbour. 

‘Certainly one of the reasons I've been here for so long is because these ideals also appeal to me,’ he continues. ‘Architecture is a collaborative exercise. There are those who are out front and those who are in the back room, but they all have a role, they're all equally important. I enjoy that debate and I'm very practical – I built my own house, literally, over 12 years – and for me this place has always fitted. There have obviously been some amazing opportunities.’

The project that defined the early practice was Lloyd’s of London, which started in 1978 and was finally completed in 1986. It catapulted Rogers to stardom, helping shape a new, more media-friendly definition of this ancient profession. ‘Although the practice was very democratic, Richard took the role of standing out front, and being the public persona of the practice,’ says Harbour.

Throughout this period, the nature of authorship in architecture was hardly questioned. The starchitect era was defined by iconic buildings and iconic architects, but although Rogers stood shoulder to shoulder with his former partners Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, along with many other big names from that generation, there was always the sense that the Richard Rogers Partnership was more collegiate than corporate.

‘There's been much written about Lloyd’s of London and the way that building came about. Lloyd’s saw this practice as a team that might help find the answer for them rather than give them the answer,’ Harbour says.

These days, such an approach is hardly unusual. Younger firms are more explicit about the collaborations that they do, whether it’s with clients or other professionals, and architecture is more about problem-solving than making bold statements.

Does the new name mean that RSHP will become more anonymous? ‘We wanted to put an emphasis on the group because I think it is more representative of how we are,’ says Harbour. ‘Of course, people love abbreviating, so in a sense it felt natural.’ When it comes to the work and the clients, the studio has always had what Harbour calls a ‘conversational approach’.

‘New clients approach us with preconceptions, and quite often the biggest preconception is that we’re used to working with large budgets, but on this project, you're not going to have so much. Well, believe me, everyone says that,’ Harbour says. ‘You also need a level of naivety to be creative. I've personally never thought of us as competing, but rather that we offer an alternative. However, I don’t know any other way. It’s an approach that I enjoy. In order to get through life, I think you have to enjoy it. We’re different, certainly.’

Rogers was also a prominent campaigner for the built environment, both as an architect and in his political role as Lord Rogers of Riverside. ‘Richard was particularly unique as an architect because he was really a conductor. You can have the score and instruments, but you need a conductor to put the music together,’ says Harbour. ‘His interests took him to places that gave him more space to think laterally.

'Graham and I can originate – we can stare at a blank sheet of paper and talk about something that might emerge from it. That's quite hard work in itself. We did discuss with Richard whether we would try to replicate him and his approach. But ultimately we all need to be ourselves. When I first became a director, I asked him, “What are you expecting of me?” And he said, “Well, just we're expecting you to be what you are, nothing else.” I was clearly doing something right, so I just needed to keep going.’

RSHP will continue to quietly shift the paradigm. Aspects of the studio’s work – like prefabrication construction methods – continue to evolve. ‘We’ve been looking at modular construction for almost 20 years or more. I disagreed with Richard at one level, because I thought the success of our work on modular would be just to change construction – it didn’t really matter what it looked like. It was about minimising waste and increasing performance. Richard had a far more traditional modernist view – he wanted it to look modular.’

Just as one of the earliest and most famous of all RSHP’s projects, the Lloyd’s building, was designed to accept change, so the practice itself is refusing to stand still. Harbour points out that the skyline is now almost completely enveloping this Grade I-listed modernist landmark, once the biggest building in London after the Natwest Tower.

New additions include the studio’s own 224m-high 122 Leadenhall Street – the so-called Cheesegrater – home to the RSHP studio since 2015, when it vacated its famous riverside studios in Hammersmith.

‘I think architecture has changed immeasurably over the last 30 years, but I think we can still surprise in good ways,’ Harbour says. ‘We've just completed some social housing in Cardiff, a carbon-positive scheme using modular construction. The [houses are] very modest.’ Although a great many of the buildings shaped by the studio have gone on to become instantly recognisable, enduring classics, Harbour doesn’t believe they’ve ever consciously followed fashion. ‘We're currently involved in five metro stations in Melbourne,’ he says. ‘One of the reasons we were brought in was that the local government was concerned about the “modishness” of the proposals. They told us this had to last a hundred years. I jokingly said that presumably, they asked us because as we’re never in fashion, we’re also never out of fashion.’

The rebranding is subtle and low-key, building on the identity created by Pentagram for the switch to Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, which resembled a typographic city skyline. ‘Personally, over the past 30 years, I’ve been consistently obsessed with making things work at a people scale,’ says Harbour. ‘So actually, the city skyline is less important to me, beautiful though the logo was. Instead, we have an identity mark – it’s less about names and more about the collective approach.’

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This major new transport project by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners was completed just days before the death of its founder, Richard Rogers, late last year. The Aile Est (East Wing) at Geneva Airport is a monumental new addition to the Swiss facility. RSHP worked closely with the Jacques Bugna architecture studio in Geneva, as well as the engineering offices Ingérop in Paris and T-Ingénierie in Geneva to steer this project to completion, some ten years after it was originally conceived. 

Superficially, this is a building that’s all about colour, or at least that’s what passengers will perceive. Just like the practice’s Terminal 4 at Madrid’s Barajas Airport, with its rhythmically shifting hues, the new East Wing uses colour as a means of subdividing and enlivening the vast space.

Behind the scenes, there is an awful lot more going on. For a start, the building is designed to be energy positive, a hugely ambitious goal given the size of the space and its 20,000 sq m of façades. In addition, the 520m-long building contains 7,000 tonnes of steel. 

All this structure is put to good use. The terminal has a parallelogram-shaped cross section that is bisected by the inverted pyramid forms of the mighty steel frame, which elevates it up off the ground, as well as supporting both floors and the roof. Up here you’ll find over 7,000 sq m of photovoltaics, which are paired with 110 geothermal piles that plunge down to 300m below the ground to source thermal energy.

Those expansive windows are triple glazed, with shutters for additional solar shading. The terminal will eventually tap into the existing GeniLac hydrothermal system, which uses the waters of Lake Geneva to heat and cool the city’s buildings. 

All that space serves six aircraft stands, and represents a major upgrade on facilities that were initially installed as a temporary measure built to accommodate the then relatively new Boeing 747. Since the Geneva project was originally conceived, the Jumbo’s natural successor, the A380, entered and left production, and the aviation market endured a 60 per cent market dip due to the pandemic.

Nevertheless, the new building still made economic and environmental sense for the airport. 

Each hour, there’s room for 2,800 passengers to leave and 3,000 to arrive, their journeys guided by the colour-coded elements.

The terminal’s steel frame and structural elements are painted in two shades of grey, pairing with the natural stone flooring and the light flooding in through the vast windows to minimise the need for artificial illumination. Each 80m module is then given a different unifying colour for the seating and ceiling elements. 

The project broke ground in 2012, starting with the construction of the geothermal piles. This was followed by the construction of a new road tunnel and technical basements, then the demolition and relocation of existing services before the main new East Wing jetty could be built and fitted out.

The latter process ran from April 2017 to July 2021, during which time the airport had to remain operational, a major logistical challenge for the design and construction teams. 

Finally, there is the view. Raised up above the tarmac, the East Wing not only gives passengers an impressive view of their aircraft, but showcases the Jura Mountains in the north, welcoming visitors to Switzerland’s spectacular landscape.

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As one of the most influential architects of our era, Richard Rogers had an immeasurable impact on the modern city. His studio brought artistry and elegance to everything from factories and warehouses to office towers, transforming the literal building blocks of architecture into their primary aesthetic expression. As a pioneering exponent of what became known as ‘high-tech’, Rogers and his peers realised the machine-age dreams of the first modern architects.

Born in Italy, Rogers studied at the Architectural Association and then Yale, where he met Norman Foster and Su Bramwell, later to become his first wife and partner, together with Foster and Wendy Cheesman, in Team 4 Architects, founded in 1963. After over a decade of experimental, pioneering practice, working mostly in industrial architecture, the studio fragmented, and the Richard Rogers Partnership was set up in 1977. The studio’s first major work, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, came to define an era. Devised in collaboration with another titan of the new industrial architecture, the Italian Renzo Piano, the Pompidou was the most prominent of the five projects the partnership completed. Drawing on the spirit of 1960s experimenters like Archigram, the arts centre created huge floor plates of flexible exhibition space by pushing all its services to the exterior. The result was a jigsaw of coloured pipework and snaking escalators that stood in striking contrast to the historic fabric of the city.

Piano went on to set up his own Building Workshop in Genoa, but Rogers, it seems, was destined to go from one epoch-defining building to another. The next project on the drawing board was a new office for Lloyd’s of London. Whereas Pompidou carried the loose fit legacy of 60s freedom into the 70s, the Lloyd’s Building presaged the rather more strait-laced and venal qualities of the 80s. It was corporate HQ as power suit, adopting the Pompidou’s infamous ‘inside-out’ qualities for the City streets, yet with a sober disavowal of colour; stainless steel and glass were the dominant materials. In the six years it took to build, technology barely had time to catch up with the vision and it opened in 1984, over-budget and highly controversial, but also undeniably brilliant. It was perhaps the first modern office building to capture the joy in detail that defined the great municipal buildings of Soane or Lutyens, swapping decoration for a delight in technology.

In 1986, Rogers, alongside James Stirling and Foster, had an epoch-defining show at the Royal Academy. This was the architectural equivalent of Hugh Hudson’s cinematic war-cry: ‘The British are coming!’. High-tech architecture was deemed the true heir to the legacy of the country’s white hot technological revolution, a space age affirmation of the Dan Dare futurism that infused the post-war era. Rogers, however, never quite subscribed to his former partner’s love of the machine. RRP’s work was underpinned by a long-running obsession with urbanism and sense of social justice. Rogers’ commitment to big ‘m’ Modernism was firmly rooted in the movement’s socialist origins. Rogers had architecture in his blood. His cousin, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, was one of Italy’s leading post-war architects and the creator of the 1958 Torre Velasca in Milan, along with his partners in BBPR. There has always been a broadly Mediterranean approach to the role of society, family, culture and space in the Rogers office. The practice’s self-designed studios in Hammersmith were famous for being to adjacent to the River Café – co-founded by Rogers’ second wife Ruth. The practice itself limits its directors’ salaries to a proportion of the lowest wages, and there are generous employee benefits that have maintained a loyal, long-serving team.

For a while, Lloyd’s’ industrial aesthetic led to a run of genuinely industrial projects, with schemes for urban design thwarted by funds or opposition. Massively complexity bred specialisation within the firm, and decade-long projects became increasingly common as clients approached Rogers’ team to untangle complex puzzles of urbanism and infrastructure. At the same time, the firm evolved a palette of materials, forms and colours, refining off-the-shelf components and developing their own bespoke solutions for the services and structure that shaped their works.At the pioneering, Philip Johnson-curated ‘Machine Art’ exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1934, industrial objects like ball-bearings and springs were placed on pedestals and celebrated like shiny abstract sculptures. Perhaps this point of divergence – one path to streamlining and machine-made purity, one path to naked mechanical fascination – is what divides Rogers from Foster. The latter might be said to have more discipline, more desire to see the machine subsumed by the sculptural potential of new material; but Rogers, on the other hand, finds not just aesthetic purity in mechanical innards, but a freedom of space and function.

Inevitably, success has meant an increase in scale. From its inception, the Rogers Partnership has never baulked at grand projects. This has occasionally meant sticking his head up above the parapet and taking some political flak. It’s widely agreed that RRP’s Millennium Dome was the best thing to come out of the UK’s flawed year 2000 celebrations, a vast structure that subsequently fulfilled its flexible brief. Despite other well-publicised spats – most especially with the Prince of Wales – Rogers inevitably became an establishment figure, living in a grand Georgian conversion in the heart of Chelsea, receiving a knighthood in 1991 and taking a seat in the House of Lords five years later. Baron Rogers of Riverside can still rile the industry, only these days it’s the firm’s broad portfolio – running from the Homeshell experimental pre-fab housing unit through to London’s most expensive apartment building at One Hyde Park – that is sometimes at odds with its social conscience.

The practice’s own democratic structure is undiminished. In 2007, Ivan Harbour and Graham Stirk became senior partners and the name was changed to Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. Rogers retired in September 2020, and his final project, the Drawing Gallery at Provence's Château La Coste, was unveiled in spring 2021. A small but spectaular building within an orange still frame that cantilevers out of a thickly wooded ridge, the building offered a powerful summation of the life and work of a visionary architect.

Experimentation and innovation are high on the agenda for Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. Housed in 122 Leadenhall in the City of London – the firm’s own smartly designed spec office building, sitting over the road to the tailored perfectionism of Lloyd’s – upcoming projects include Terminal 4 at Shenzhen Bao'an Airport, a distillery for Horse Soldier Bourbon in Kentucky, the Hammersmith & Fulham Civic Campus in London, and H-Farm, a library and auditorium at the heart of a start-up education campus in Venice. Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners continues to offer a bold architectural vision.

Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners' latest residential project, No. 33 Park Row, has just completed in New York. The scheme, commissioned by developers Centurion Real Estate Partners, is also the very first design by the famed London based practice to join the Big Apple's luxury residential scene. The design was led by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Rogers and Graham Stirk. 

No. 33 Park Row strategically overlooks lower Manhattan’s historic City Hall Park – and not just that, but every single of the residences inside has views of its green expanses. The development features just 30 homes, from one to five-bedroom apartments and penthouses, within a sleek structure that bears many of the hallmarks of a RSHP building. Signature copper screen fins arranged across the facades bring to mind previous projects from the firm, such as One Hyde Park in London. An elegant combination of glass and metal accompany a modern, if slightly industrial approach that remains however perfectly suited to its domestic use.

While the boutique development's scale is intimate, its residences are anything but, providing generous floorspace and wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling windows which make each unit feel even roomier. The apartment interior design features a clean aesthetic, crisp white walls and high ceilings to match the overall architectural approach, while allowing the views to steal the spotlight. 

Residents' amenities include a fifth floor indoor/outdoor fitness center and yoga studio; an outdoor kitchenette and dining area; a 24-hour doorman attended lobby and concierge; a generous rooftop terrace, library, craft studio, screening room and bike storage.

Finding its place at the nexus of Tribeca and Financial District, No. 33 Park Row balances a sense of old and new, open and private - and all just a stone's throw from the architectural gardens of City Hall Park

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Last September, when Richard Rogers stepped down from the architectural practice that he founded more than 40 years ago, he still had one personal project underway. Now, the last building of Rogers’ long and distinguished career, the new Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste in Provence, is complete. It’s tiny, but spectacular. Vivid orange and hovering, apparently weightless, the building cantilevers out of a thickly wooded ridge too steep for planting the vines that grow in neat rows on either side.

The gallery is the latest addition to developer and hotelier Paddy McKillen’s remarkable collection of art and architecture across the Château La Coste estate – a winery and cultural destination that includes his smallest hotel, Villa La Coste (W*214). McKillen also leads The Connaught and Claridge’s, and other luxury hotels in Monaco, Los Angeles and Kyoto.

Rogers joins a roster of stellar architects who have contributed buildings to the Château La Coste project. In 2008, McKillen tasked Tadao Ando with creating a pavilion, and a reflecting pool for Louise Bourgeois’ Crouching Spider and Alexander Calder’s Small Crinkly. He followed this up with a chai de vinification (wine storehouse) from Jean Nouvel and a gallery designed by Renzo Piano, while he also shipped in Frank Gehry’s 2008 Serpentine pavilion from London.

McKillen had wanted to add a building from Rogers, a long-time friend, ever since he acquired Château La Coste. It took time for the right idea to emerge from a series of conversations, most of them involving lunch. During a weekend at the estate in 2011, McKillen, Richard and his wife Ruthie Rogers took a bike ride along the chalky track of an old Roman road that skirts the vineyards. ‘I gave Richard two things, the idea of a gallery to show drawings, and the view,’ McKillen remembers. That was when Rogers hit on the idea of creating the gallery as a single dramatic gesture, a giant cantilever that leaps off the ridge seemingly into mid-air with no visible means of support. It was the chance to realise a long-held ambition, to pay homage to the cantilevered terraces of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater that Rogers had first seen as a student at Yale in 1962.

McKillen recalls two crucial moments in the evolution of the design. The first was at Courchevel, where he and Rogers went skiing the following spring. ‘Richard took me to see a house projecting off a hillside held up by a single column. I remember him saying, “If we can’t get the gallery to work, we can always put in a column”. But it was that column that gave it all away. And that’s when I said, “It’s either 100 per cent pure, or it’s not, and if it’s not pure, better not do it at all”.’

Stephen Spence’s sketch for the pavilion. Richard Rogers’ best known early work is arguably the Centre Pompidou in Paris, completed in 1977 with Renzo Piano. In the same year, the architect founded the Richard Rogers Partnership in London, which evolved into Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) in 2007. Now the practice has 11 partners and has just launched a new office in Paris – marking Rogers’ retirement by returning, in a way, to where it all began. ‘We currently have a range of exciting new projects in progress there, in a range of typologies at a wide range of scales,’ says RSHP partner responsible for France, Stephen Barrett. ‘Prompted by Brexit and the regrettable drawing up of once permeable boundaries that it implies, we are finally taking the plunge in setting up a Paris office, all these years after the project office that Richard and Renzo established in the early 1970s. Of course, we’ve never really been away, and London and Paris are so very close, but this step is also an affirmation, an important symbol of confidence and commitment to a country and to clients we value deeply.’ 

Wright used reinforced concrete to launch a pair of terraces into space. Rogers’ cantilever is tailor-made from steel tubes. According to his engineer Bob Lang, ‘it works like a see-saw’. A pivot positioned on the edge of the ridge takes the load. The shorter, landside arm is anchored to foundations sunk into the ground by two sets of galvanised steel rods. They counterbalance the weight of the longer arm that forms the gallery, a box inside the steel frame, with a glass end wall trained on the view of the green Luberon hills like a telescope, and no support in sight.

The next conversation was at the Rogerses’ house in Chelsea, London. It’s where McKillen, Rogers and his long-term collaborator Stephen Spence decided on the exact shade of orange to paint the steel. In working out the optimum size of the gallery, they looked close to home. The volume is 5m wide, the distance between the kitchen counter and the windows of the Rogerses’ house. It is also 4m high, matching their mezzanine, and 24m long, exactly twice the width of the room.

Making buildings that touch the ground as lightly as possible has always been as much a part of Rogers’ work as his love of bold colour, and making the most of a view, from the first house he built in Cornwall as a member of Team 4 with Norman Foster, to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The new gallery has all three attributes. Equally important to Rogers is the idea of rescuing the construction process from the messy uncertainty of a building site.

Another of Stephen Spence's early sketches for the project. The Drawing Gallery at Château La Coste is part of a growing list of work in France for the office, including: Maine Montparnasse masterplan, 2019-ongoing; Gare de Lyon Daumesnil masterplan, 2014-ongoing; Bercy Charenton masterplan, 2009-ongoing; The Roads of the Future Grand Paris, 2019; One Monte Carlo, 2019; Centre de conservation du Louvre à Liévin, 2019; Terminal 1 at Saint Exupéry Airport in Lyon, 2018; Grand Paris, 2013; European Court of Human Rights, 1995

The gallery, completed with the help of local architects Demaria Architecture, was prefabricated at the Bysteel factory in Portugal, a process that began with a team slicing through heavy steel tubes at precisely the right angle, with just a chalk mark for guidance. The next step was welding the major pieces together; no easy task, given that as the metal cools, the weld shrinks. Engineering consultant Michael Hasson, who guided the fabrication for Rogers, calls the skills demanded to get the steel to behave as needed ‘a collision between art and science’. João Manuel Faria de Sousa, who led the Bysteel team, recalls: ‘We had a 100 people working on the project. You could see their enthusiasm. It was like making a sculpture.’

With the kit complete, the pieces were bolted together in the factory to make sure everything fitted. Then they were dismantled, loaded onto two lorries, and driven to Château La Coste. For the last leg of the journey, the pieces were transferred from the trucks to a tractor trailer and moved to the site along a farm track, to be assembled with little more than a spanner, a cherry picker and a set of temporary supports.

Now that it’s finished, the gallery is a powerful summation of Richard Rogers’ work, as much as a place to enjoy the landscape around it, and the temporary exhibitions it will accommodate.

INFORMATION

rsh-p.com

chateau-la-coste.com

Back in the summer of 2012 The Macallan – makers of luxury single malt scotch whisky since 1824 – launched an international competition for the design of a new and architecturally audacious project. Incorporating a new factory, HQ and ‘Distillery Experience' for visitors, the proposed building was to be situated on an existing field within 485 acres of The Macallan Estate and the listed Jacobean manor, Easter Elchies House, aka The Macallan’s spiritual home.  

The client set architects and engineers a rigorous brief for a design-focused brand home that would project the vision and direction of the leading single malt whisky marque into the future. With the barley field site of the new building at the edge of Scottish countryside designated as an ‘Area of Great Landscape Value’ – a land corridor following the sweep and contours of the River Spey integral to The Macallan Estate and The Macallan Fishing Beat – any competitive proposal would have to be brave, bold and audacious while remaining sensitive to the surrounding environment of ancient Scottish earthworks, long cairns, brochs and wells. The importance of the neighbouring ancestral house had to be respectfully acknowledged but the new distillery would also be required to increase The Macallan’s production of whisky by up to a third. Quite a challenge. 

Enter Graham Stirk of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the London-based practice whose impressive portfolio includes One Hyde Park, the Leadenhall Building, NEO Bankside London and the Millennium Dome. Stirk provided a plan that mitigated the impact of the building; a response to the landscape as the primary context rather than the disparate nature of the existing built facilities and storage units.

But it was Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners’ projected roof design that offered the most compelling prospect. Said to be one of the most complicated timber structures in the world – 1,800 single beams, 2,500 different roof elements, and 380,000 individual components, almost none of them the same – the undulating canopy would be a beautiful, meticulously engineered, wood and steel wonder.

‘Whilst the roof design is described as a landscape response, the roof was never intended to disappear or be lost within the hillside,' explains Toby Jeavons, Associate Partner and Project Architect at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. ‘As such, the roof is positioned on top of the retaining structure and not bound by it. This allows the upstanding depth of the roof structure to act as a balustrade to the grid line and to the Northern edge of the roof as it appears to meet the ground. As the roof "sails" above the retaining structures, it is freed from restraining ground pressures and loads.'

Eventually completed back in 2018, the roof structure consists of two principal parts, the primary tubular steel support frame and the rolling domes and valleys of the timber grid shell. The primary steel frame is laced through the centre of the timber beam structure and helps to resist the torsional forces. The timber domes act in compression and the interconnecting valleys are hung between the domes. All the roof beams are straight and all the cassettes are flat, double-skinned panels.

‘This provides the facetted appearance so important for the "engineered landscape",' says Jeavons. ‘Despite the highly repetitive and rotational roof geometry, the finished structure is constructed from over 380,000 components. All of the timber beams are vertical and a constant expressed depth of 750mm which allows for considered and neat interfaces with internal partitions as well as the solid and glazed facades.'

The changeable highland weather and uncompromising Scottish elements also proved a significant factor in the building’s material construction and profile. ‘The architectural concept of the distillery allows it to thrive in the Scottish elements by reflecting the very nature that surrounds it. The profile is low and hugs the ground. The roof structure anticipates severe snow loading, and the natural green roof coverings utilise a specific, low maintenance mix of Scottish wildflowers and meadow grasses suited to the location.'

To satisfy the proprietor’s desire for increased yield, practicality and an efficiently attractive, visitor-friendly space, the architects envisaged a facility that contained a rhythm of production ‘cells' which could be conceptually added or taken away to provide the required capacity.

‘A production cell is a combination of the required fermentation and distillation vessels which we have positioned in a circular arrangement. This is to increase the visibility of the beautiful production equipment. By situating the hand-made copper pot stills in an elevated central position the building celebrates the entire production sequence.'

‘The distinctive roof configuration is a reflection of the circular production cells beneath it and takes the form of a laminated veneered lumbar (LVL) orthogonal grid shell. The use of timber is in part a reflection of the particular importance that The Macallan place on wood during its whisky’s maturation process – a crucial factor which accounts for up to 80 per cent of the character of the single malt whisky. The roof undulates with equal rhythm over four process cells below and is then pulled higher to the South where the roof accentuates and highlights the Visitor Experience’s point of entry.'

For inspiration, Graham Stirk and his team examined historic plans for the original estate dating back to the early 18th century, notably a Thomas Whyte plan, which hangs in The Oak Hall in Easter Elchies House. This helped inform the setting of the building, in particular, the serpentine approach to the Visitor Experience entrance at the southern end of the facility.

‘It was always important to us that the two buildings were physically joined,' says Toby Jeavons. ‘The Experience is the reception – and not a separate area where one learns about the distilling process abstractly. It was important to deliver a clear view into beautifully co-ordinated production area. In this building, nothing is to be hidden away.'

INFORMATION

rsh-p.com

Architects love nothing if not a challenge. Programme and budget are always key factors in making up such a project. Storage facilities, for example, may not immediately jump out as the most obvious opportunities to create something special, often perceived as modest (if not unimportant), auxiliary buildings, rather than design-led creations in their own right. Yet there's plenty to be enjoyed in such a commission, as Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners demonstrates in its latest offering, a conservation and storage building in France. Then again, their client was the Musée du Louvre. 

Located in the campus of the storied French museum's Lens outpost in Liévin, the new building was conceived to house and protect some 250,000 works of art that could not remain in Paris, due to the fact that the main building did not have a flood-risk prevention plan, while being right by the River Seine and partially on a flood zone. In search for space to guarantee the safekeeping of its pieces, the institution initiated discussions for a complex that would combine valuable storage with conservation labs – and RSHP won the commission in 2013. Fast-forward six years and the new addition to the Lens site has just been completed.

For a building with such a serious and important duty, entrusted with the protection of priceless cultural treasures, perhaps one thing that stands out upon approaching is its unexpectedly playful entrance – an arched canopy jutting out at a strangely odd angle to the rest of the, admittedly fairly sober, building. The stairs up to the main door follow the same angle, creating a fun take on perspective, and hinting at the fact that this is not your ordinary warehouse. 

Overall and from a distance, the structure is very discreet: a long box made of concrete, close to the ground and semi-submerged into a gentle hill with its one free side fully glazed and looking out towards the main street running along its side. From the outside, all you see ‘is a rising landscape', says RSHP senior design partner Graham Stirk. In a way both this building and the nearby SANAA-designed exhibition pavilion (a few minutes walk away) respond to the flat surrounding landscape by keeping things low and minimalist. 

The interior is neatly designed around two ‘boulevards', placed at an angle to each other, and off of which are arranged rows of storage rooms of different sizes. Manipulated perspective comes into action here again, as the building's roof gradually slopes down towards the rear, almost halving in height at the narrow end of the site's trapezoidal shape. This also allowed the architects to ‘stitch the building into the landscape, rather than creating a pavilion building within a landscape', explains Stirk. 

Everything in the storage areas was meticulously designed according to size and artwork requirements – with specific furniture created for certain types of objects so that there's a bespoke home for everything in the collection. ‘And this is not deep storage, where things come never to be seen again', says RSHP partner John McEglunn. ‘There is a rotation of objects going to and from Paris'. 

Several conservation laboratories are placed in a row at the front, behind the glazed facade, while storage is further back into the slope, where sunlight becomes less important. ‘We celebrate the spaces for conservation instead of hiding them', says Stirk. A set of offices is located near the entrance, on a mezzanine level created by the extra height allowance there. 

On plan, the layout looks plain and practical enough, but the experience of walking through the space reveals an impressive, almost cathedral-like interior in the main ‘boulevard'. The whole building is topped by an arched concrete ceiling (made of prefabricated elements). The unusual shape might bring to mind a different version of art-filled space – the Kimbell Art Museum by Louis Kahn, although comparisons probably end there as scale, programme and details are different (no clerestory windows here for example, as this ceiling is topped by the soil of a green roof). The reason behind choosing that shape was structural functionality, explains McEglunn. ‘How do you create big open spaces to allow the flexibility for all this kind of furniture? With concrete there's only certain sizes of spans that you can go to. It's about efficiency. All these vaults are precast.'

In a building of this typology, technology needs to be fine tuned to perfection, so there's rigorous climate control everywhere, plenty of natural light where needed and carefully planned fire safety measures throughout. Interiors are wrapped in concrete walls partially clad in plaster panels dotted with tiny holes that help with acoustics. Concrete helps regulate temperature too; one more reason to pick this material (the last time the firm explored it as a pre-cast finish internally was the Lloyd's Register of Shipping in the late 1990s, points out Stirk). 

The building was designed to be bio-climatic, using heat pumps to generate power, rainwater collection, recycling 74 per cent of its construction waste, and a meadow of local species on its green roof (landscaping was designed in conjunction with Francais Mutabilis Paysage). The clever layout arrangement also means there's five levels of security between the car park and the storage areas, so that only the people who are supposed to be there have access, adds Stirk.

Even though this is in many ways a relatively modest structure (in style, but also budget, stress the architects), proportions are generous, volumes feel grand, and light is in abundance; making this building, populated mostly by staff and visiting experts, an elegant cross between an industrial building and a space for art. ‘The artwork in here is priceless, so we tried to create something more like a reliquary I suppose', says McElgunn. ‘Something elegant, the noble space that these pieces deserve'. 

INFORMATION

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The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has cut the ribbon on a new building on the campus – the biggest and tallest yet. Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP), the Central building has a shifting façade that responds to its urban context and environmental conditions.

The School launched a campus master plan in 2011 that overhauled the whole Holborn site. Involving demolition, redesign and rebuilding, the plan saw the impressive Saw Swee Hock Centre designed by O'Donnell + Tuomey Architects open in 2014. Grafton Architects’ Marshall Building is currently on site, and completing in 2021.

While the reconfiguration has been unfolding, in the meantime students have forming their own paths through the site – always finding the most direct, yet complicated routes from A to B – around a lift core and out of a fire escape, relying on LSE’s trademark red cube as a guide. ‘Business as usual’ was the biggest challenge of the whole project for Terry Spraggett, managing director of public sector construction at Mace.

After hurdling complicated planning applications and negotiating a land swap with Westminster, RSHP’s building is the latest piece to be slotted into the puzzle – and it solves a significant part of the campus puzzle. With it, it brings a new square, a stepped timber seating and planting area, much more space than its predecessor. Including seminar rooms, conference-sized auditorium, study spaces, a ground floor public café, faculty offices, and a new alumni centre, it’s a proud new landmark for LSE.

Creating a focal point for the campus was an important part of the brief for Tracy Meller, partner at RSHP, who headed up the project. RSHP certainly know how to make an impact, yet there was also the (closely) surrounding architecture to consider. To the square, the building is a colourful LSE block expressing modernism, with its yellow louvres and a glazed façade that reveals red ceilings and open stairways inside the building. Yet overlooking Houghton street, a small road linking it and the campus to the Strand, it quietens down, adjusting its colours and levels to the historic façade opposite.

As well as aesthetically impressive, the façade design enables the building’s BREEAM outstanding rating. Increasing in depth as they rise, the louvres shade the building and provide a framework for windows that can be opened to naturally ventilate 70 per cent of the building.

The design evolved a fair bit from the competition stage. Brexit happened just before tender and the cladding went up in price by half a million pounds overnight. Plans had to change, but the Central building maintained its presence, functionality, and uniqueness.

There’s an auditorium for 200 people beneath the open-air square, reached by a staircase designed for socialising and informal meetings. There’s also the ‘Academic stair’ that unfolds in double height spaces through the faculty levels from level three to 12. It encourages a midday meander down to another department, instead of rolling into the lift on default.

The student levels feature open plan spaces for informal study and plenty of soft work booths in orange and grey that complementing the colour palette of the interiors – exposed concrete sofits, pigeon grey-painted steel, red acoustic baffles and blue staircases.

The building sees the trial launch of the ‘LSE-style lecture theatre’ to rival the classic Harvard-style theatre – ‘not that we are competitive or anything’ says Julian Robinson, director of estates at LSE. This one-of-a-kind theatre design features two sets of tiered desks facing each other, so students can easily switch from individual to group working by swivelling their chairs around. ‘Like the Houses of Parliament, it is set up for debating – semi-confrontational with chaos in the middle.’

Once you’ve wound your way up various stairs, your reward will be access to three outdoor terraces. From the 13th floor, you can step outside to see London from any angle – the spire of the neighbouring Central London County Court looms particularly close. If you look down onto the LSE campus, you’ll spot several pockets of planted spaces populated with seating, it's a campus of rooftop terraces. So while building works continue at ground level, students can search out some space above the city.

INFORMATION

rsh-p.com

lse.ac.uk

ADDRESS

London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London
WC2A 2AE
UK

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The Royal Institute of British Architects has announced the shortlist for the annual Stirling Prize that highlights the UK’s best building of the year. The projects on the list include a house made of cork, a gin distillery and one of the UK's busiest stations – revealing the diversity of UK building practice today.

Grimshaw’s London Bridge Station was commended for its voluminous, light-filled concourse. A residential housing scheme in Norwich by Mikhail Riches with Cathy Hawley held up for its energy efficiency. Feilden Fowles’ Yorkshire Sculpture Park visitor centre was recognized for its connection to the landscape. The Nevill Holt Opera, renovated from a 17th-century stable block by Witherford Watson Mann Architects and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners’ Macallan Distillery both attracted shortlisting because of their unique offerings.

‘These six buildings could hardly be more diverse in typology and scale – from a rustic stable block-turned-theatre to a vast national railway station. But what they have in common – ground-breaking innovation, extraordinary creativity and the highest quality materials and detailing – sets them apart, rightfully earning them a chance to win the highest accolade in architecture,’ says RIBA President Ben Derbyshire.

So what does the ‘best’ mean? In 2019, for RIBA, that means ‘ground-breaking innovation, extraordinary creativity and the highest quality materials and detailing,’yet also projects that seek to address the big issues important to the UK right now – from the housing crisis to global climate emergency.

‘From the way that Cork House experiments with entirely plant-based materials, to Goldsmith Street’s ultra-low energy affordable homes, each of these six buildings push the boundaries of architecture, exceeding what has been done before, and providing solutions to some of the most pressing challenges of our times,’ says Derbyshire.

INFORMATION

Nevill Holt Opera, Leicestershire, by Witherford Watson Mann Architects. ‘A contemporary opera theatre within a 17th-century stable block’– RIBA. Photography: Hélène Binet. Read more here…

The fascinating, state-of-the-art world of international espionage now has a home to match its intrigue and allure; enter the newly launched International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. The structure, designed by London based Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP), is about to open its doors to the public in a celebration that also marks the very first cultural building in the US for the renowned UK architecture firm. 

The structure, which spans some 13,000 sq m, is now the permanent home for the non-profit organisation that was previously housed in the historic Le Droit Building in Downtown Washington. The new home's angled façades and strongly transparent character are instantly arresting, but they hide a surprise within; propped up on columns a ‘black box' comprises the majority of the ultra-flexible exhibition spaces.

Underneath this floating structure sit generous public spaces and specialised areas. Meanwhile, a metal staircase connecting all seven floors is suspended along the outside of the metal-panelled west façade and enclosed in a suspended glass atrium called the ‘Veil', explain the architects.

The building includes a generous lobby, ticketing and retail space, a 150 seat theatre, classrooms, an event and banqueting area and offices – as well as over 3250 sq m of exhibition space to display its unique collection of spy artefacts from all over the globe. It is, after all, the only public museum in the United States ‘solely dedicated to the tradecraft, history, and contemporary role of espionage,’ explain the architects. 

‘It has been an absolute delight to have been involved in the design of the International Spy Museum. It is a building for the future that will bring its neighbourhood to life,’ says Ivan Harbour. ‘A celebration not only of the long-standing human activity that it showcases, but also of the city around it. A landmark for 21st century D.C.’

Washington’s International Spy Museum opens to the public this weekend.

INFORMATION
For more information visit the RSHP website

ADDRESS

International Spy Museum
700 L'Enfant Plaza SW
Washington DC
20024
US

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The French gallerist and dealer Patrick Seguin started collecting examples of Jean Prouvé’s ‘demountable’ housing in 1991, and since then has built up a large collection of these remarkable structures. Prouvé developed and patented the idea of his prefabricated house in the late 1930s, but it didn’t go into production until the end of the Second World War, when the French government commissioned 800 units to provide temporary shelter for those who had been left homeless by bombing. In the event only around 400 were made, most of which were subsequently destroyed or abandoned as the state constructed permanent homes.

Seguin has rescued many of these rusting shells, built without insulation or bathrooms, and in 2015 he commissioned Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners to make one of the original houses liveable, by adding electricity, hot water, a kitchen and a bathroom. Initially on show in the Renzo Piano-designed pavilion at the Château la Coste in Provence, the Prouvé/Rogers building has now been added as an extra suite for the hotel itself, and a select group of art collectors, artists and architects will be invited to enjoy the experience of staying in an original Prouvé house.

The interior of Room 30, as it will be known, has been kitted out with art and design objets from Seguin’s personal collection, while for those not lucky enough to be invited to stay, the Piano pavilion will host a parallel exhibition of Prouvé’s furniture, as well as associated art such as a Calder sculpture and a Léger watercolour that were formerly owned by Prouvé himself. Saving a design icon from undeserved obscurity, Seguin and Chateau La Coste offer a truly unprecedented opportunity to spend time in a uniquely designed and significant piece of architecture; a chance for the visitor to appreciate its design value as well as the structure's beginning and long history.

INFORMATION
’Jean Prouvé, l’âme du métal’ will be on show at Chateau La Coste until 5 March 2019. For more information, visit the Galerie Patrick Seguin website

Travelling in style is a true marker of luxury – and the important business, finance and cultural hub of Hong Kong knows this well, if its brand new boundary crossing facilities are anything to go by. An impressive building dedicated to movement through the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge Hong Kong Port has just been inaugurated, to a design by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) and Aedas. 

Part of the boundary crossing complex links to the region's striking new bridge, the latest addition is the Passenger Clearance Building (PCB) and it is set to not only improve connectivity across the Greater Bay Area, but also elevate the travellers’ experience of elegance and comfort. 

The PCB is built on a man-made 150-hectare artificial island, which was reclaimed from the open waters to the north-east of Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA). It has been strategically placed within convenient distances and with direct links to local transport – both on land and the sea – and was designed to serve as a gateway between Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macao; being essentially ‘a unique opportunity to give Hong Kong an architectural “front door” which celebrates travel, surrounded by water with views to a natural skyline of evergreen mountains and hills', say the architects. 

Referencing this changing and undulating landscape, as well as the constant flow of people within the project, the architects created a striking waveform roof, which defines the whole – also creating an instant visual shorthand for the design. On top of this, the roof is modular, so lent itself to offsite pre-fabrication that enabled an efficient construction process and a very high level of quality. 

‘I am delighted to have worked on such an innovative project which brings beauty and elegance to the everyday activity of travel', says RSHP partner Richard Paul. ‘The new crossing will benefit those living and working in the region greatly with enhanced connectivity as well as highlighting the contextualised sensitive roof form which responds to the undulating mountainous backdrop of such a beautiful local environment.'

Inside, the space is airy, open, bright and uncluttered, underlined by high ceilings and large openings. Careful thought has been put to wayfinding to ensure clear circulation. The building is also internally punctuated with full height ‘canyons' allowing natural daylight to penetrate all levels, explains the team. Making going through this state-of-the-art transport and infrastructure hub a both fun and efficient experience.

INFORMATION
For more information visit the website of RSHP and the website of Aedas

It's not every day that a brand new, modern residential development throws open its doors right in the heart of central London, so when the news hit Wallpaper* HQ about the completion of Burlington Gate, it certainly piqued our interest. The scheme, spearheaded by design-conscious developers Native Land and authored by Graham Stirk and his team at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, started welcoming its residents earlier in the year. Now, the project has unveiled its four striking penthouses, adding the final touch on this well-thought-out piece of architecture.

Burlington Gate contains 42 residences in total and is fairly boutique in size, compared to other developments of its type. Yet its enviable location – just a stone's throw from the Royal Academy of Arts and all that Mayfair and central London have to offer – its modern, high quality design and curated list of amenities, more than make up for any comparisons concerning size. Moreover, the ground level is going to become home to a selection of art galleries and the developers have further marked their support for the arts by offering one window to be permanently and entirely populated by work from the Royal Academy's schools programme. 

The building's overall design is another key point of difference, compared to the area's mostly historical offerings – in fact, it is a bit of a departure for its architects too. If you're expecting to spot RSHP's signature brightly coloured beams and metal joints, you're in for a surprise. The architecture practice opted instead for a more subdued colour palette, all dark greys, black and neutrals, although it couldn't resist adding a rich blue on the metal structure, which is of course openly visible, as per the studio's tradition. The external facade is a sophisticated composition of concrete, steel, glass and handmade bricks, while the building's overall volume follows the street's lines.

Common areas have been designed by Hudson & Mercer; dark wood panelling is complemented by deep pile carpets and elegant artwork. The scheme includes a generous lobby and lounge area for residents and their guests, while on the lower ground levels, there's also a gym, spa and treatment facilities, as well as parking. 

The penthouses, spread over two levels, are the work of David Collins Studio, the colourful gem-coloured furniture proving the perfect complement to the architecture. An open-plan living space is created with entertaining in mind, while upstairs, each penthouse features three good size bedrooms with ensuites. Each floor opens up to a long terrace with – rare for this neighbourhood – views over the iconic London skyline, from London Eye right through to the House of Parliament, adding one more key selling point to this one-of-a-kind project.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of RSHP

Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) and Silverstein Properties are celebrating the completion of 3 World Trade Center, the second tallest building in the World Trade Center site and the very first built work by the architects in New York City.

The tower, spanning 80 floors and some 1,000 ft, sits at 175 Greenwich Street, right at the heart of the Financial District in downtown Manhattan. Combining retail – on the lower five storeys – and office space, the commercial building is the third one to complete on site by the same developers.

Built in glass and steel, the tower features state-of-the-art design, bearing the signature light and elegant, yet confident and experienced touch of RSHP. Visible exterior bracing not only adds to a balanced, well articulated facade and volume composition, but it also allows for column-free interiors and flexible spaces inside, to suit a variety of businesses. The retail element sits at the base of the tower’s podium, where the dramatic, triple-height entrance lobby is also located.

Green design was a key priority for the team. The building has achieved high energy ratings, and includes strategies that limit spending associated to artificial lighting. This won them a ‘Gold’ Certificate for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design from the US Green Buildings Council. Additionally, there is a 5,500 sq ft landscaped garden terrace on the 17th floor and two smaller garden spaces on the 60th and 76th floor.

‘It has been a great privilege to design one of the new buildings on this key site in New York’, says Pritzker Prize winner and RSHP founding partner Richard Rogers. ‘We are particularly delighted that we have been working in the heart of this vibrant city. This was a complex and challenging project but one which has helped to contribute to the revitalisation of New York City and one which will help to inspire a new hope for the city’s future.’ 

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

As the whisky afficionados will swiftly confirm, a visit to a distillery is much more than just about the tasting; it is a pilgrimage and a journey of discovery that is just as much about the experience than the sublime drink itself. So when a leading international architecture firm, such as Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, is appointed for a new facility within the field, our interest is piqued; and in the case of the new home for the Macallan Distillery in Scotland, the results do not disappoint.

Visually striking, the new-build project is set in the green fields of the Easter Elchies Estate in Speyside, which has been creating single malt whisky since 1824. The product’s superiority and the owners’ keen sense of entrepreneurship led the business to grow, meaning that when the London-based practice was called upon to create a new headquarters for the whisky company in 2014, the latter was in need of new facilities that would both enable an increase in production, and allow for future expansion.

The new Macallan space is located some 400m from the estate’s existing distillery. The architects envisioned it as a series of production cells, set in a row. These are covered by a green roof that envelopes the building, making it at one with the surrounding leafy landscape. However, they are designed to protrude creating a gently undulating roofscape that makes it presence subtly known.

Inside, the structure encompases both production and a visitor centre. ‘The roof is one of the most complicated timber structures in the world’, explain the architects. It comprises 1,800 single beams, 2,500 different roof elements, and 380,000 individual components – and almost none of these are the same. RSHP collaborated with engineers Arup for this impressive feat; Speirs and Major were behind the lighting design, while Gillespies was the landscape architect for the project.

Production has now started at the new Macallan facilities, which have just thrown open their doors to the public.  

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

For the architecture buffs among us, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich is pretty iconic. This was the first ever public building designed by Norman Foster, and one of the key architecture landmarks of the second half of the 20th century that heralded the era of the ‘High Tech’ movement. A new wave of British architects experimenting with new technologies, materials, forms and structures soon followed.

Marking its 40th anniversary, the Centre is now launching its celebratory show SUPERSTRUCTURES: The New Architecture 1960-90, raising the glass to the genre and exploring ‘architecture’s fascination with technology in the post-war decades’. The exhibition will showcase the architects who challenged conventions with their experimentation and interest in engineering and industrial production.

Visitors can browse through drawings, sketches, furniture, film, photography and models of relevant buildings, such as the Reliance Controls Factory by Team 4 (Norman Foster, Wendy Cheesman, Georgie Wolton and Richard Rogers), the Pompidou Centre by Rogers and Renzo Piano, Rogers’ Lloyd’s of London Building, Waterloo International Rail Station by Nicholas Grimshaw and the Hopkins House by Michael and Patty Hopkins. These sit side-by-side with a brand new three-metre-long model of the Sainsbury Centre itself, to be explored and admired.

Theory and unbuilt experimentation surrounding the era is not ignored. ‘The exhibition will explore the seminal influence of figures such as Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouvé, Charles and Ray Eames and Cedric Price’, explain the organisers, adding that the show also delves into how techniques were adapted from the automotive, nautical, aerospace and information industries and introduced into the world of building and architecture.

The exhibition is accompanied by a specially published book, which is available on site.

INFORMATION

’SUPERSTRUCTURES: The New Architecture 1960-90’ is on show until the 2 September 2018. For more information visit the Sainsbury Centre website

It’s a great honour to be writing my first editor’s letter. In its 21 years Wallpaper* has transformed how the world thinks about design, architecture and art, and for the last ten years I’ve been privileged to work with Tony Chambers – who is swivelling in a new chair as Brand & Content Director, taking Wallpaper* in bold new directions and generally plotting global domination.

I’d also like to say a huge thank-you to the editors, staff, contributors, collaborators past and present (far too many to mention) who have made Wallpaper* what it is today. Wallpaper* is more than a magazine, of course. It is an international community, a super-collider that brings together the most dynamic players in design, architecture, art, fashion, travel and beyond. What other magazine can count Dieter Rams, Karl Lagerfeld, Jil Sander, Giorgio Armani, Rick Owens and Tadao Ando among its loyal subscribers? We are united by a common mission to refine, to enhance, to elevate the best from the rest, to inspire and be inspired.

Here, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a huge number of artists, designers and long-held heroes, spending time in some of the most exciting places in the world, and searching out the creative frontline. And we will continue to showcase groundbreaking, spirit-lifting and eye-opening design and to collaborate with established titans and emerging talents, wherever they are.

This issue celebrates celestial pendant lighting, nutty treats and high-functioning hotels. We shoot the Wallpaper* woman, art collection in tow, in a new Gianni Botsford house in London, talk to Alfredo Jaar about being ‘an architect who makes art’, celebrate ten years of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, take a tour of Vitsœ’s new HQ and witness the rebirth of a brutalist treasure in Mexico City and the launch of Marcio Kogan’s micro-town near Madrid. We also cook up a Swiss storm with Not Vital’s plain in pigna, the latest daring dish in our artist’s recipe series, showcase the most innovative new work spaces in our annual Officepaper* supplement, and take you to Berlin and São Paulo by way of Thailand, Big Sur and the Suffolk Riviera. In adulthood, Wallpaper* is better and brighter than ever. Now that’s cause for celebration!

Sarah Douglas, Editor

As originally featured in the November 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*224)

INFORMATION

The November 2017 issue of Wallpaper* is out now. Subscribe here

The view gets in everywhere. Framed by the vibrant, putting-green flooring and arresting rows of red, orange and Yves Klein-blue seating, St Paul’s Cathedral stares straight back, approvingly, under typically leaden London skies. The still shockingly modern exoskeleton of the Lloyd’s building shimmers shyly next door behind grey Venetian blinds. We are on the 14th floor of 122 Leadenhall, commonly tagged the Cheesegrater and unarguably the most graceful of the brand name skyscrapers that now dominate the City of London.

These are the offices of, and powerful advertisement for, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP), the architects responsible for both this and its neighbour. The two buildings were rendered about 25 years apart, but with equal skill and beauty, in the heart of an annually more anodyne district. Nearly half of the buildings in this square mile of central London have been rebuilt in the last half- century. But, ever since the success of structures such as Lloyd’s first persuaded planners to raise permitted building heights, most of the surrounding offices are not graceful or delicate like Lloyd’s and Leadenhall, but hard, overbearing, inhuman even.

In the City and financial centres like it around the world, the same ideas seem to have migrated from architect to architect and from building to building, fluently, promiscuously. In all of this, RSHP has remained apart, doing its own thing and, astonishingly for so successful a practice, even flying a little under the radar – a 200-strong firm at a time when the biggest architectural practices employ 2,000.

‘We spend most of our time trying to make big things look small,’ says Graham Stirk, one of the practice’s founding partners, wryly. ‘I think, in fact, it’s actually one of the biggest problems facing architects today, how you scale buildings up – which is what the market increasingly requires – without losing the human element. One thing I’d say about our firm is that we have one big advantage. We haven’t started out designing house extensions and worked our way up to bigger projects. I started here on big projects. My first job was on Lloyd’s 30 years ago. The fact is that the sensibility of doing bigger things is different. I’m not saying it’s harder, but it’s a completely different skill set that is required to give them a humanity of scale.’ It is now precisely a decade since the names of Ivan Harbour and Graham Stirk were added to that of Richard Rogers in the company title, and the likes of Andrew Morris and Lennart Grut were created senior partners and Ian Birtles, partner, but they had all been working together long before that.'

‘What changed when our names were added?’ muses Harbour. ‘The short answer is, not much. Except you start to feel personally responsible for the wellbeing of the office. Even today, if you ask what my hopes are for the next ten years, I’d say to still be here and still be solvent, and hopefully still have the chance to influence the conversation about urban density and vitality. But I’d settle for still being here, still clinging to the rock face.’ ‘The idea of creating the new partnership was really all about continuity,’ explains Rogers. ‘The only example I could think of where the names and the structure of the practice stay the same over time was Saarinen Swansen, and even then he was passing to his son. Mostly, for a practice like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, say, the founders go and the structure evolves into something else. Not good or bad, but different.

I didn’t want that. I wanted work at the same level of intensity and vision, so I asked the two most talented designers to join the masthead and added the directors.’ RSHP has always had a written constitution to help ensure this commitment to a similar vision is shared out equally. Famously, partner pay is capped at a fixed multiple of the lowest paid architect. And everywhere there is a feeling that intellectual interrogation is not some necessary evil, but the lifeblood of the place. Some architects find that their style slips into syntax as the years pass and the awards pile up. That their youthful flourishes assume the weight of an intractable world view, a weight for which they are not always prepared. These are not those sort of architects.

This flexibility can be seen in the fact that what was once a one-man practice that handled one project at a time, now has more than 40 projects on the go. These range from new airport terminals in Geneva, Taoyuan and Lyon, to a whisky distillery for The Macallan in Speyside in Scotland, and museum projects in Monaco and Lens. As expected there is much to admire. But there is so much more variety than one might imagine. Astonishingly, the British Museum extension, completed in 2014, was the practice’s first cultural assignment since the Pompidou Centre, completed in 1977. It will soon be joined by a new collections facility at the Louvre Lens.

Looking at the list of projects, the large scale and the impossibly large scale exist in a comfortable equilibrium. Ivan Harbour has been working on the largest: Sydney’s Barangaroo masterplan – think Canary Wharf, done by designers with soul – for as long as his name has been on the door. He headed up a team of 30 local architects, with six imported from the offices in London. It is, depending on how you measure these things, the largest infrastructure project in the world. The practice’s direct involvement is drawing to a close now, but there are still three buildings by Renzo Piano and one by Wilkinson Eyre to be delivered as part of Harbour’s plan. The project mirrors, in many ways, the resilience of the practice as a whole.

‘It turns out that 2007 wasn’t a great year to start a firm of architects specialising in large-scale infrastructure projects,’ laughs Stirk. ‘In fact, financial crises seem to time nicely with our ten years of existence.’ ‘Barangaroo only happened,’ continues Harbour, ‘because after six months Australia realised they didn’t have a recession. They thought they would get one like everyone else, but because of their banking regulations they didn’t. And then the Australian dollar shot up and not only was the project still on, it actually meant we could afford to do it.’

There is a tradition of architects adapting and improvising their way towards beauty in unpromising sites, as Herzog & de Meuron did with their railway signal box in Basel, or Calatrava with his textile warehouse in obscure Coesfeld, but this has become an RSHP trope. Neo Bankside, the upmarket, now five- tower residential scheme on London’s Southbank was envisaged as a single monolithic building by successive developers and planning chiefs, a dreary block on a dreary site. RSHP delivered air, space and transparency (a bit too much transparency for some residents facing Tate Modern’s new viewing platform).

Few buildings, though, travelled as far from their origins as the Geneva airport plan. ‘The airport is basically underground, underneath the runway,’ says Stirk, ‘and the plan called for what was essentially a 750m tunnel. You could have brightened it up a bit with a few light wells, but it would have been impossible to create an environment there to make travelling more pleasant.’ How the practice managed to do just that – creating a terminal with lakeside and mountain views – is a story that has been repeated in some form or other over the past decade.

In their best work, there is evidence of the relentless interrogation of solutions, tested in turn by the vagaries of budget or site or brief, or all three. The characteristic movement, as here at Leadenhall, is one towards purity and the beauty of simplicity.

‘Architects love to talk about simplicity and that is a virtue,’ agrees Stirk, ‘but simple and simplistic are two different things. Eighty six per cent of this building was made elsewhere and just assembled here. We had 250 people on site. When we did One Hyde Park in 2011, we had 2,000. Next door [the Lloyd’s building] had twice the budget and half the floor area, but that, if anything, is what we have learned in the last ten years. However you resolve architectural problems, you have to do more with less. And you absolutely can.’

As originally featured in the November 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*224) – out on 12 October

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners website

Now in its third year, built environment symposium Vision takes place at Olympia Central in west London and is aimed at architects, designers, specifiers and their clients working in the commercial, health, education and retail sectors.

Big names featuring in the seminar programme include Foster + Partners, RIBA, Arup and the Netherlands’ UNStudio. Roger Ridsdill Smith will talk about the clever use of innovative materials in Foster’s recent projects, while RIBA president-elect Ben Derbyshire will present 'Supurbia', a vision to transform London’s suburbs.

Programme highlights include presentations from leading thinkers at the forefront of architecture and innovation. When he isn't working on international architecture projects as lead architect at ZHA, Stefano Paiocchi has been busy working on his project 'Code-Structed Skins: Design as Research', which sheds light on how the fields of architecture and fashion might co-operate. In his talk at Vision 2017, Paiocchi will liken the human body to a complex built structure which needs to be covered, and will suggest that the world of fashion design can borrow from architecture’s computational principles and methods.

Andrew Lawrence of Arup will pick through the engineering challenges that he faced to build The Smile, Alison Brooks Architects’ centrepiece for the 2016 London Design Festival, and Andy Young, head of BIG’s London office, will outline his practice’s ‘yes is more’ approach to architecture and the formula for future contemporary office design.

Meanwhile, Caroline Bos from UNStudio is to unveil new research exploring the impact of the circular economy on the built environment. She will explore how traditional retail and architecture typologies struggle to meet the needs of today. There is an increasing focus on the digital marketplace and the sharing economy, she believes, and a shift from the commercial consumption of goods to experiences.

According to UNStudio, the future of retail will be mixed-use entertainment, co-working spaces and fitness centres, which still hang on to an element of retail. Up-and-coming talent will include ex-Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners architect Benjamin Garcia Saxe. Via a live link from Costa Rica, he will speak about tropical architecture and will question what is nowadays meant by sustainability.

INFORMATION

Vision 2017 runs from 6-7 June and is free to attend. For more information or to register for tickets, visit the website

ADDRESS

Olympia Central
Hammersmith Road
London W14 8UX

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Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners has completed the final tower of the International Towers in Sydney, marking the culmination of the first major part of its masterplan for the Barangaroo South area which unites the CBD with the waterfront.

Looking out over Sydney's western harbour, the facades of the three International Towers are covered with colourful fins designed to deflect heat while allowing light to enter. While visually cohesive as a trio, each tower is unique, reacting to its orientation.

As well as a striking addition to Sydney’s iconic skyline, the project has been lauded for its environmentally conscious design, receiving a prestigious Six Star Green Star rating (an Australian sustainability guide). Features include solar panels, rainwater capture and recycling and blackwater treatment, as well as substantial bicycle storage in the basement.

Setting a precedent for future builds of this kind, the towers were designed to meet all the requirements of modern working, including dynamic spaces and holistic interior planning. Housing a range of businesses, office spaces in the International Towers can be adapted to suit every style of working through a flexible 2,500 sq m of floorplates.

The 23,000 office workers populating the towers will also have access to a range of areas with high ceilings and large vertical open spaces, as well as welcoming lobbies on the ground floor, with vast windows opening up the buildings to the street.

Part of RSHP’s aim for the masterplan at Barangaroo South, the largest urban renewal project in the city since the 2000 Olympics, was to create a new location for work and play in the city and to open up the area to the public through architecture.

The towers are designed to interact with the natural thoroughfare of the streets, positioned in a radial formation to break up the city grid and invite people to navigate through the site, initiating an outdoor culture to contrast the CBD's tight surrounding network of streets and solid buildings.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners website

The annual Wallpaper* Architects Directory was conceived in 2000 as the ultimate little black book of new architectural talent, in an effort to both celebrate and map out the world’s best young practices, year-by-year, spanning countries and continents; and what a journey has it been.

We’ve so far featured over 450 practices from all continents (OK, maybe not Antarctica – yet) and photographed over 100 of them in the most amazing architectural sites across the world, from Tokyo’s Shibuya Station by Tadao Ando, to Diller Scofidio and Renfro’s Lincoln Centre project, Richard Rogers’ Heathrow T5, the Neues Gallery in Berlin by David Chipperfield and the Shard in London, by Renzo Piano.

Not that the Architects Directory was the first time we supported budding talent. Leading names such as David Adjaye, Seth Stein, UNStudio and MVRD, all made an early, pre-2000 appearance in the pages of Wallpaper*.

Nurturing emerging practices and seeing them grow into global creative brands has been an exciting story in itself – and there’s been a lot of that. Our ever-growing roster includes now-internationally acclaimed names, such as Allied Works, Brian McKay-Lyons, Claesson Koivisto Rune, Niall McLaughlin, Sean Godsell and Grafton Architects.

For more on the Wallpaper* Architects Directory in our 20th anniversary October 2016 issue (w* 211)

dRMM 
Featured in 2001
Alex de Rijke, Philip Marsh and Sadie Morgan founded dRMM in London in 1995 and have been prolific, working with equal ease on projects of all scales, from large housing projects to smaller ones, such as artist Richard Wood’s home and studio, WoodBlock House (pictured here). Their innovative and socially relevant approach is renowned.

Atelier Oi 
Featured in 2004
Founded in 1990 in Switzerland by Aurel Aebi, Armand Louis and Patrick Reymond, Atelier Oï is a multidisciplinary firm that blurs the boundaries of design; its body of work features a diverse bounty of products, set design, architecture and interiors, such as stores for Rimowa and Pringle of Scotland.

Sean Godsell
Featured in 2001
Australian architect Sean Godsell is revered for projects like the St Andrews Beach house (pictured here) and RMIT Design Hub. He applies his minimalist, refined aesthetic to residential and commercial structures alike, keeping in touch with his country’s climatic characteristics and using a modern material palette - inspired by its locality - to perfection

Deborah Berke 
Featured in 2002
Apart from leading her namesake New York-based firm, Deborah Berke has also just kicked off her time as the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Her prestigious practice’s work includes the Bard College Conservatory of Museum and interiors for 432 Park Avenue in New York

Claesson Koivisto Rune
Featured in 2000
Swedish firm Claesson Koivisto Rune founded by Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune in 1995, started off as an architecture firm, but evolved into a successful multidisciplinary uber-practice, experimenting with furniture, textiles, and even confectionery. Their wide-reaching skill set soon propelled them to international design stardom.

MAD Architects 
Featured in 2007
MAD Architects, established in China in 2004 by Ma Yansong, started small but quickly transformed into a global brand, becoming one of the country’s leading firms. MAD is behind some of the world’s most striking structures, such as the Harbin Opera House (pictured here). 

Brian MacKay Lyons 
Featured in 2002
Brian MacKay-Lyons – currently the co-head of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects together with Talbot Sweetapple – is based in Halifax, Canada. The practice works on an array of cultural, commercial and, most notably, residential projects, such as the Sliding House and the recently completed Enough House on MacKay Lyons’ own famous farm and education project, Shobac

Grafton Architects
Featured in 2000
Grafton Architects, founded by directors Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara in 1972 are now globally acknowledged for their refined, contemporary style. The firm has a number of exhibition participations and education projects under their belt, such as the modern and minimalist Luigi Bocconi University building in Milan. 

Allied Works
Featured in 2002
Allied Works, the 40-person practice led by Brad Cloepfil, has offices in Portland, Oregon and New York City. They first graced our pages in 2002 but the firm quickly grew since, working on a roster of impressive projects. Key completions include the Sun Valley Residence (pictured here) and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York

Tuckey Design
Featured in 2006
A context-sensitive approach sits at the heart of all Jonathan Tuckey projects. Over the years, the designer has perfected the art of transforming historic buildings into chic, contemporary spaces. With offices in London and Andermatt, Switzerland, the firm is renowned for its seamless weaving of old and new. 

David Adjaye
Featured in 1997
With offices in London, New York and Accra, David Adjaye’s firm has acquired international prestige through a diverse range of projects. Works such as the Aishti Foundation in Beirut (pictured here) and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington – about to open its doors this month – are a case in point of Adjaye’s skilful architecture.

UNStudio
Featured in 1999
Amsterdam-based UNStudio’s early work includes architecture classics such as Mobius House and the Erasmus Bridge (pictured here). Not that directors Ben Van Berkell and Caroline Bos rested on their laurels after that. The firm is now working internationally and has recently expanded with three additional offices in China. 

MVRDV
Featured in 1999
MVRDV, founded in 1993 in the Netherlands by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries, made a splash with early work such as the WOZOCO housing complex. They since developed into a global super-practice, applying their unique approach to offerings such as their impressive Rotterdam Market Hall, located in Rotterdam (pictured here). 

Seth Stein
Featured in 1998
Award-winning architect Seth Stein is a master of minimalism, combining a pared down approach with contemporary flair and luxurious materials. While best known for one-off houses in stunning rural settings or modern urban boltholes, his recently completed equestrian centre near Melbourne highlights the firm’s far-reaching skills. 

It’s been a busy six months for The Berkeley as a crack team of designers led by Robert Angell and London-based architects Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners worked on three major projects within the hotel – the first, an expanded entrance, and two extensions.

The new entrance, especially, has been long overdue – the former low-key approach is now considerably enhanced by impressive volumes and proportions.

The architects have unapologetically described their design as a first in hotel architecture. Specifically, Ivan Harbour, a partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour, says his firm was careful to avoid ‘the lightweight, ‘high tech’ add-on entrance canopy cliché that has pervaded our cities since Llloyd’s of London. At The Berkeley, we conceived the entrance as a complete new building – a contemporary lean-to.’

The reference to a lean-to is a sly understatement, for the new entrance is a dramatic statement piece, particularly in the evening when the whole structure practically flares in the dark.

A glass canopy is stretched out over 16 nine-metre-long carbon fibre beams that provide a pleasing geometrical pattern that provides structural strength without sacrificing the sense of feathery lightness. The entire structure rests on an austere forest of timber masts and stainless steel columns driven into the stone base. Flanking each end is a full-length glass pavilion, both forming the new extensions to The Berkeley’s beloved The Blue Bar and the newly christened Collins Room (formerly the Caramel Room).

Honeycomb details on the canopy glass and pavilions create a subtle effect of dappled light on the new lobby by Robert Angell who has installed veneered eucalyptus wood panels, marble floors, alabaster wall lights and nickel inlay details.

The project, as ambitious as it is, is only the first salvo in The Berkeley’s tip-to-toe spruce up. Up next is a series of new suites by designed by John Heah and Helen Green Studio, alongside new outdoor terraces by Rogers Stirk Harbour

ADDRESS

Wilton Place

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London-based architecture firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners has upped-sticks from its Hammersmith HQ, creating new offices in one of its own famed structures: the Leadenhall Building.

Since its conception 30 years ago, the firm has grown from a small partnership into a 200-strong architectural powerhouse, and it needed a space to match. The practice wanted somewhere that could comfortably accommodate all of its employees on one floor, to promote communication and collaborative working. The Leadenhall Building (which was completed in July 2014) provided just such an opportunity. And where better to set up camp than a building that already has the renowned RSHP stamp of approval?

Maurice Brennan, project architect and RSHP associate explains, 'When we started the design of RSHP’s Level 14 fit-out we already knew the building inside-out. We had written the original Leadenhall Building occupier fit-out guide, but we were now being encouraged by our client turned landlord to tear it up and come at it afresh.'

And fresh is right. The turf-green carpet creates a vibrant base for the uninterrupted, light-filled 1,100 sq m studio space. Brennan adds, 'We dispensed with ceilings and gained an extra metre in height to give a floor to soffit height of 3.7m.' In doing so, Leadenhall's intricate skeleton is unveiled, piqued by a specially adapted gridwork of LED lights. Developed by Arup in collaboration with Speirs + Major, they subtly shift in colour throughout the day, from cool to warm, to mimic the natural deviations in daylight.

Every decision has been made with the staff, colleagues and clients in mind, which goes hand-in-hand with the user-focused Leadenhall philosophy. RHSP have complete control of the air quality, thanks to the compartmentalised, floor-by-floor air conditioning system.

Despite the speedy 16-week turn-around time, senior partner Andrew Morris explains how finding the perfect new home for the firm wasn't easy. The partners looked around a number of different locations, from Soho and Brick Lane to places well outside of their beloved London, 'but the opportunity of moving to one of our own buildings was irresistible – and the best commercial offer. Our studio now embraces our collective atmosphere, and clients can experience first hand our architecture and how we use it.'

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners website

Photography courtesy Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

ADDRESS

The Leadenhall Building
122 Leadenhall Street
London, EC3V 4AB

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London’s Building Centre has just launched an exhibition exploring the work of Mimar Sinan (1490-1588), the famous architect of the Ottoman Empire era. And while the show, entitled ‘Sinan: The First Starchitect’, offers, as expected, plenty of rich, historic material of the master’s work in Istanbul and beyond, it also gives its own inventive, modern twist to the tale.

Sinan was a contemporary of Palladio and Michelangelo, point out the organisers Turkishceramics and the Architects' Journal, yet his work goes largely unnoticed outside the academic community and the geographical regions where his buildings can be found. This show, curated by Rory Olcayto, sets out to right this and explore how he helped define the look and feel of the Istanbul of his time and beyond, revealing how his work served ancient and contemporary communities alike.

A group of London-based architects – including Ian Ritchie Architects, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, DSDHA, Reiach and Hall Architects, Sam Jacob Studio and Bureau de Change – travelled to Istanbul and Edirne a few months ago to study Sinan’s oeuvre. Drawing on their experience and the architect’s legacy, they developed a series of individual research projects around his work, brining his legacy to the 21st century.

The result? A show that balances old and new, Sinan’s aesthetic achievements and masterful use of ceramics, with his indisputable engineering skills – his portfolio ranges from high profile work in the former-empire’s capital to infrastructure work, spanning domes and minarets, bridges and aqueducts.

A publication celebrating Sinan’s work, as well as these contemporary interpretations, is also available at the Building Centre in conjunction with the exhibition.

INFORMATION

‘Sinan: The First Starchitect’ is on show until the 10 June. For more on the exhibition visit the Building Centre website

ADDRESS

The Building Centre
Store Street
London
WC1E 7BT

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Time flies – and yes, it is the time of the year again to begin the exciting, annual RIBA Awards cycle. The first shortlists are now coming through, with the London Regional Awards nominees announced today.

2016 RIBA London Regional Awards for architecture promise an inspiring line-up. There is a rich total of 68 projects for the juries – which traditionally divide up the capital in four territories: north, south, east and west.

Beautiful family houses sit side by side to smaller and larger housing developments for all budgets – including projects such as the Y-Cube by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners and the Tailored House by Liddicoat & Goldhill. 

Commercial building and cultural work are also in abundance; 8 St James's Square by Eric Parry, the Wilton's Music Hall by Tim Ronalds Architects, the Newport Street Gallery by Caruso St John and the Gagosian Gallery Mayfair by TateHindle (with interiors by Caruso St John), are within the nominated projects. 

And this is just the beginning for the RIBA Awards. The regional shortlists kick-start the process that will result, later in the year, to a selection of winners, which can in turn be considered for the highly coveted RIBA National Awards. The winners of the latter offer the shortlist for the big winner of the year – the RIBA Stirling Prize, announced in the autumn of 2016. 

The winners of this first phase will be announced during a special awards ceremony on May 3, at the Stirling Prize-nominated University of Greenwich, Stockwell Street Building.

INFORMATION

For more information on the awards visit the RIBA website

Celebrating a decade in the business, UK-based real estate agency The Modern House has launched an eponymous book exploring its most extraordinary properties, from Su and Richard Rogers’ modernist Wimbledon landmark to apartments in the Barbican and beyond. (The company’s fitting tagline: ‘Selling Britain’s finest modern architecture’).

The Modern House was co-founded in 2005 by former architecture/design journalists Albert Hill and Matt Gibberd (himself the grandson of modernist architect Frederick Gibberd), and together have captured a niche corner of the property market.

Leading with an introductory essay by Wallpaper* editor-at-large Jonathan Bell and published by Artifice Books, the new tome is divided into four themes – town houses, conversions, country houses and apartments. ‘Rather than being an exhaustive survey, this book instead offers our own distinctive snapshot of what it means to live in a modern way in Britain,’ explain Gibberd and Hill in the books foreword.

To wit, the book is an ode to Britain’s remarkable modernist architecture, spanning homes completed in the 1930s until as recently as two years ago. Alongside the usual suspects (London’s seminal Isokon Building, for one), The Modern House also hones in on lesser known architectural gems, as well as younger architects such as Zoe Chan and Merlin Eayrs (their striking Design Award-shortlisted Herringbone House in Dalston marks a new sort of British modernism).

Whether you’re in the market for a starchitect-designed home (Carl Turner's 'ice cube' house is back on the market for a cool £1.595m) or are simply a design-savvy tourist, The Modern House is an indispensible compendium of England’s most enviable residences and interiors.

INFORMATION

Published by Artifice Books, £29.95

A major new prize aimed to discover the best new buildings from around the globe is being unveiled today (8 December) by the RIBA, and proudly partnered with Wallpaper*. The 2016 RIBA International Prize will honour a building which exemplifies design excellence and architectural ambition, and delivers meaningful social impact.

On the prestigious judging panel, chaired by Richard Rogers, is Nigerian-born Kunle Adeyemi, an inspiring young architect, whose firm NLÉ is based in Amsterdam.

Adeyemi's work and outlook epitomise the new award's ambitions. 'Social impact is an important aspect of architecture today,' he says, 'because it addresses some of the critical issues of our time: urbanisation and globalisation.'

NLÉ's ground-breaking Makoko Floating School floats on the lagoon in the Nigerian city Lagos, where Adeyemi studied architecture. He is now looking to expand that project with recreational and commercial infrastructures 'to enhance and improve the living conditions on the waterfront.'

Other urban and architecture projects in Africa include the Chicoco Radio Media Centre, an amphibious building in the Nigerian Delta city of Port Harcourt. 'As well as a radio station, there will be an amphitheatre, which will act as a public space to be used for cinema or a market,' he says, 'a structure that brings people together.'

Adeyemi's previous experience at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture will also stand him in good stead as a judge. He led a number of significant OMA projects, including China's Shenzhen Stock Exchange tower.

The RIBA International Prize jury is on the hunt for projects that stretch the boundaries of architecture, regardless of style, complexity or size. 'For me, size is not about direct physical scale, it's about the quality and impact of the work and the thought that's been put into it,' says Adeyemi. 'It's important to rethink the criteria for excellence in these critical times.'

The 2016 RIBA International Prize opens for entries today, while more the names of the remaining jury panel members will be unveiled in January 2016.

The kiosk design, named Rock, was created in collaboration with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The architect’s projects in Africa include the Chicoco Radio Media Centre, an amphibious building in the Nigerian Delta city of Port Harcourt.

The scheme is designed to host a radio station, but also can become an open air amphitheatre and public space for cinema or a market.

NLÉ’s ground-breaking Makoko Floating School can be found on the lagoon in the Nigerian city of Lagos.

Built for the coastal water community of Makoko, the structure draws on local vernacular and units raised on stilts.

Working with Lagos’ local, tropical climate, Adeyemi and his team suggest an alternative approach to the traditional division between public and private functions.

The prototype floating structure will primarily serve as a school.

Adeyemi is now looking to expand that project with recreational and commercial infrastructures.

Credit Direct Limited is one of the fastest growing microfinance banks in Nigeria and NLÉ worked on the proposal for their new headquarters.

The design creates a building that brings together all the bank’s functions but also becomes a building that is open and approachable to the public.

INFORMATION

For more information on NLÉ visit the website

Images by NLÉ

Taiwan’s largest international airport is getting an architectural redesign, courtesy of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.

The British architects have beaten off other prestigious practices – including Foster + Partners and UN Studio – to design the new Terminal 3 building of Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport, formerly known Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, with a proposal that is ‘inherently simple in its concept.’

Ivan Harbour, partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners explains: ‘We have created a rationally planned and easy to use airport that will be characterised by a flowing sequence of beautifully lit, acoustically comfortable and well-proportioned spaces. It will be an airport where the drama of the spatial experience is shared by all, at all times.’

Working with Taiwan engineering firm CECI and combining their learnings from Heathrow Terminal 5 and Barajas Terminal 4, RSHP’s latest project will be compromised of a new terminal building, boarding gates, concourses and a multi-function building with an impressive transport infrastructure. The dynamic, fluid structure will allow for easy adaptations and future transformations without compromising on passenger experience or architectural integrity.

Inspired and shaped by Taiwan’s landscapes, seas and its natural pace of life, the new terminal will be housed under an elegant hard shell roof. Within, adjustable scaling will enable to creation of changeable spaces, increasing wellbeing and comfort of travellers.

‘The approach to the airport and the open spaces within it will have an urban quality akin to a city centre,’ adds Harbour. ‘Addressing these spaces there will be a variety of buildings that, together with the new and existing terminals, will form the heart of a new compact, vibrant ‘aero’ city.’ 

INFORMATION

Imagery courtesy of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

Surrounded by green patches of suburban parkland and rows of identikit cream-painted houses, the bright collage of colour that fronts the YMCA’s new Y:Cube housing development is certainly unexpected in its context.

Built over the last six months on a patch of wasteland in Mitcham, London, the scheme is essentially a blueprint for a new way of quickly and cost-effectively supplying affordable and sustainable homes on brown field sites.

Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the 36-unit development is built for single people in desperate need of affordable housing after moving on from homelessness hostels and supported housing schemes. ‘Supply lags behind demand and housing becomes ever more unaffordable, particularly in London,’  stated Richard Rogers at today’s unveiling. ‘Y:Cube can become a nimble and innovative response to the housing crisis we face.’

Built off site in a factory in Derbyshire, each unit, Senior Partner and Lead Architect for Y:Cube Ivan Harbour tells us, ‘takes about a week to build and comes equipped with its own, floor, ceiling and external services,’ so they are instantly deployable. On site, they are stacked, one on top of the other before being ’stitched’ together along the floor and roof joints.

In Mitcham, the units are laid out in a U-shape around an internal garden courtyard, clad in slate grey and salmon pink cement board panels and punctuated by a patchwork of bright red, orange or yellow doors and balconies. Each unit has a double aspect with a front door that opens onto the garden or out onto the street, while balconies were made deliberately wide to accommodate tables and chairs and to help foster a sense of community. ‘The social spaces became critical,’ says Harbour, ‘so we’re not just providing a unit that functions but we’re providing a place that people are excited about. If they’re excited about it they’ll look after it.’

Inside, the 26 square-metre units are divided into two main spaces - a living/kitchen space and a bedroom with an en suite - but feel surprisingly roomy thanks to generous ceiling heights and plenty of daylight.

‘This innovative scheme aims to give young people the chance to rent their own home in the capital at an accessible price and is part of a range of much needed housing the Mayor has helped deliver,’ says Deputy Mayor for Housing and Land, Richard Blakeway. ‘I hope the site we are launching today is the first of many more to come across London.’

For a building housing the world's largest accessible collection of espionage artefacts, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners' design for Washington DC's International Spy Museum is decidedly conspicuous; even when – or perhaps especially – considering the proposal themes of 'concealment' and 'in plain sight'.

Be that as it may, new renders of the museum building are aesthetically impressive, possessing clear – if stripped down – parallels with practice founder Richard Rogers' iconic co-design of the Centre Georges Pompidou (in no small part due to RSH+P's signature red detailing). The most prominent new alteration within the firm's masterplan for the city's L'Enfant Plaza, the Museum features an expansive, inverted trapezoid atop a single floor, glass walled 'atrium' at ground level. 

The building's key functional spaces are found in the 'exhibition' and 'events' boxes: the former featuring three levels of exposition, theatre and teaching areas; the latter a double height glass structure perched on top of the exhibition halls, offering further event space and lofty panoramic views of the city and waterfront. 

The International Spy Museum, explains the practice, will influence the character of the area 'by generating activity and interest within a neighbourhood noted for large scale government office buildings'. Building proposals for the new site and structure were submitted to the US Commission of Fine Arts on 16 July – approval is now awaited. The museum is currently located within downtown DC's Pennsylvania Quarter; as well as a permanent collection including such idiosyncratic trinkets as a lipstick pistol, a pigeon camera and a pair of spectacles concealing a cyanide pill (for spies favouring suicide over torture), it also hosts a range of 'interactive spy experiences' and, currently, a comprehensive exhibition on the history of Bond villains.

York might not be an obvious place to go looking for Jean Prouvé masterpieces, but down an unremarkable dirt road nestled amid yellow rapeseed feilds, inside a hangar- sized warehouse, sure enough, there’s a six-metre-square Prouvé demountable house sitting in a corner, looking rather quaint. Its weathered steel-and-timber frame reveals the 70-odd years that have passed since it was originally built in 1944, as part of an order for emergency housing from the Ministry of Reconstruction and Town Planning, to rehouse war victims in bomb-ravaged France.

Nearby, two newly commissioned, unfinished rocket-shaped pods, their insulation and metal framework still exposed, are propped on stilts as if preparing for take-of. When completed, the cylindrical capsules, designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP), will host kitchen and bathroom facilities that can be attached to the Prouvé house. Come mid-June, new and old will combine to transform a structure once intended as a disaster relief shelter into a modern holiday retreat that will be showcased at Design Miami/Basel by the Paris-based Galerie Patrick Seguin.

‘Isn’t it just beautiful?’ asks Patrick Seguin as he tours the Prouvé structure. He is on a visit to the workshop of Stage One, the firm behind the manufacture of RSHP’s pods (as well as the construction of recent Serpentine Pavilions), where the house is being assembled. ‘These buildings were conceived as temporary constructions to meet a necessity. They survived in very limited numbers and, in order to ensure they don’t disappear altogether, we must give them a second chance, a second function and a second life – yes, they must live again!’

Undeniably, the humble house is beautiful in its rusted, rustic simplicity and enduringly relevant in form and thinking. Seguin and RSHP’s ambition is to both preserve and reinvent a piece of architectural genius, lending it new power to engage and inspire, its signifcance underlined by extending its life into the 21st century. They hope the redesign might also encourage fresh thinking about demountable disaster relief housing.

The house is one of dozens that have passed through Seguin’s ownership since he founded his eponymous gallery in 1989, becoming one of the preeminent dealers of Prouvé furniture and architecture. Seguin embarked on the project in December 2013, approaching Richard Rogers, an old friend, about RSHP undertaking the adaptation, confident that the practice would respect the original structure, while offering an innovative solution. RSHP and Prouvé also had a bit of history: the French architect was president of the jury that determined the plans for the Centre Pompidou, and so played a pivotal role in selecting the now iconic Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano design. ‘I liked the idea of placing these two great practices into a dialogue with one another, a few generations apart,’ says Seguin.

‘The brief was rather simple: turn this house into an autonomous retreat that can function anywhere in the world, from summers in the south of France, to winters in Colorado,’ says Ivan Harbour, the RSHP partner leading the project along with Tadashi Arai, making it the firm’s smallest project in scale, though not its least complex. ‘Transforming a disaster relief house that is just about enclosure into a space with demountable plumbing and electrics is not so simple,’ he notes. For RSHP, the key was to touch the existing building as lightly as possible and avoid aping Prouvé’s language. Their adaptation, which adds just eight square metres of space to the house’s existing 36, would be clearly distinct and separate, while staying true to Prouvé’s mission.

The original structure’s prefabricated components could be assembled in as little as a day, a truly mobile home built without any foundation. The adapted structure is just as light on its feet and the house is now entirely self-sufficient, equipped with a bathroom and a kitchen powered by two service trolleys that slide discreetly underneath the house’s frame: one is for recycled rain water (drinking water will be topped up separately), the other for electricity (from solar panels). RSHP worked with engineers from ChapmanBDSP and Arup to iron out the many technical challenges that come with ftting complex functionalities into such a small space.

The project has also involved refurbishing existing elements: vacuum insulation was applied in-between the house frame’s wooden panels, while the original roof and floor have been replaced with more durable solutions that will hold up in diverse climates. A new outdoor sun deck reveals a dual function: a cantilevered weight system allows the terrace to be folded up and used as a shutter.

‘What’s fascinating to me is that you’re very aware of what you are proposing for every five millimeters of space,’ says Harbour, who hopes that the adaptation will foster a discussion about energy efficiency, which is at the heart of the design. He underlines that the house is an exercise in moderation, rather than luxury.

‘Prouvé once said he would love to make architecture that leaves no trace on the landscape,’ adds Seguin. ‘This was 35 or more years before the word “sustainable” was even pronounced – this was so ahead of its time, and now we can bring that vision to life.’

For collectors whose interest might be peaked by the RSHP adaptation, it’s tough luck – this project is not for sale. After Design Miami/Basel, it will head to the south of France. The Seguins will install it on a property where their friend, the architect Jean Nouvel, is currently building them a home. They will occupy the Prouvé while the Nouvel is built and, later, it might transition into a guest house, when it’s not out on loan to a museum or educational institution, which Seguin hopes it will be frequently.

‘In Basel we will show the house furnished with Prouvé’s own designs,’ says Seguin. ‘Whenever I’ve shown these furnished houses in the past, they are so beautiful, you just want to move in.’ This time around, it seems Seguin intends to do just that.

As originally featured in the July 2015 issue of Wallpaper* (W*196) - out now

An invitation from gallerist Patrick Seguin to attend a design workshop with architect Richard Rogers is not one to be snifed at. Seguin – collector, dealer and world authority on Jean Prouvé – thought I may be interested to witness the final stages of a personal project he’d been working on with Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. A project that would revitalise and give a second life to one of his Prouvé demountable houses.

So last September I made my way to RSHP’s studios in Hammersmith, London, to watch Seguin, Rogers, Ivan Harbour and Tadashi Arai wrestle with the finer details of form and function. The house in question, a humble six-metre-square structure of wood and steel, was one of a series created by Prouvé in 1944 to rehouse war victims in France. Similar ones are most often seen these days in museums or galleries, but the challenge for RSHP was to introduce contemporary comforts, adding plumbing and electricity, to make it usable as a modern holiday home while staying true to the pragmatic spirit of the original.

And there could be no one better than Rogers for this challenge. The similarities between his philosophy and Prouvé’s are clear. Both are champions of functionality and innovation, but more importantly, they share an undeniable sense of optimism for the power of architecture to bring about social change. I learned on my visit that their paths had, in fact, crossed back in 1971, when Rogers, together with Renzo Piano, had pitched for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. As president of the selection panel, Prouvé played an instrumental role in commissioning the building that came to revolutionise contemporary architecture. To see Rogers come full circle, transforming and breathing new life into the work of Prouvé was a special treat.

For the full story, pick up the July 2015 issue (W*196) - out now - or click here

To the occasional visitor, London seems in a constant state of flux, with clusters of tower cranes, raw concrete cliffs of freshly cast cores, city-block sized excavations and miles of hoardings, covered in glossy images of a fast-approaching future. Yet real progress is slow. The new Leadenhall Building - now undergoing a lengthy interior fit-out - took over 12 years from conception to completion.

Rogers Stirk Harbour's latest tower is an unmistakable presence on the City skyline. It was back in 2001 that the site's owners, British Land, set up a competition to transform a humdrum 1960s building into one of the most desirable office addresses in the capital. The site's nearest neighbour is that icon of 1980s high-tech, Lloyds of London, Richard Rogers' immaculately tailored suit for the precise requirements of the 80s-era insurance market. Now Grade I listed and as iconic as any twentieth century building, Lloyds is far removed from the practice's latest structure.

There were plenty of conditions to fulfil in terms of heritage and economics. To achieve the necessary yields, British Land needed to build up to 224m high. But to preserve the views of St Paul's Cathedral, in particular from along Fleet Street, any new tower had to be as inconspicuous as possible. That's how the distinctive angled façade came about, as the tower 'leans back' from Sir Christopher Wren's definitive dome. Unsurprisingly, the £268m tower doesn't magically vanish as a result, but it's a welcome break from 'cigarette pack'-shaped convention.

At ground level, too, the two buildings represent changing design and planning priorities. Rogers laments that Lloyds was originally designed to integrate into its immediate surroundings, almost all of which have subsequently been redeveloped. In contrast, Leadenhall is all about the public realm. By raising the tower up by up to 28m above a new half-acre plaza, RSH has contributed a healthy chunk of space to the land-strapped City. The adjoining St Helen's Square is currently undergoing major refurbishment and the finished result will place the pedestrian in a angular glass and steel jungle, surrounded on all sides by the canted steel and curved glass of the modern era.

Leadenhall itself is tough, a welded gate compared to the filigree of Lloyds. A chunky steel frame supports the office floors, while at the rear a separate structure supports the lifts, which rise up through a polychromatic thicket of glass, beams, pulleys and shafts. There are shades of Mies' Lever House in the chunky steels at ground level, and the plaza with its Pret-gobbling points shielded from fumes and noise by giant slabs of glass, is certainly dramatic. But it's a box set binge, rather than a slow release of intrigue.

That long escalator rising up from the plaza is the start of the journey into a private realm, taking you into a sleek elevated lobby that feels detached from the street. A bevy of screens will soon scroll into life, pumping out facts, figures and snippets of news, while employee access is carefully controlled via what Graham Stirk refers to as 'iPod-like reception desks'.

This is a spec building - that is to say it wasn't designed with a tenant in mind. But no modern corporation wants a sub-standard HQ, so every aspect of the Leadenhall is tailored to perfection. The lift lobbies are striking for the purity of the detailing and the cars themselves are billed as the fastest panoramic lifts in the world. From lobby to 45th floor takes barely 30 seconds as you ascend, Iron Man-like, above the City. It'll be an addictive thrill for the new masters of the universe who'll be taking up big chunks of floorspace, including AON and Amlin Insurance. 6,000 people will eventually work here, filling these pristine spaces with office chairs and countless tons of electronics. The views, as you'd hope, are spectacular, looking south over Rafael Viñoly's still-controversial tower to the point of the Shard, or north past the Heron to the hills beyond.

'This is a private building that has a fantastic piece of public space at the ground floor,' says Rogers, explaining how the constraints of planning, the willingness of clients and the ongoing march of technology has shaped this new addition to the skyline. Yet for all the pointy-edged drama of the tower itself, the Leadenhall's lasting legacy (apart from bringing the name 'cheesegrater' into architectural parlance) will be that plaza. For the first time, pedestrians can stand back and see the perpetual animation of the Lloyds façade, the silvery elevator pods sliding up and down the stainless steel surfaces. Rogers could never have foreseen that this piece of street theatre would one day be a backdrop for one his practice's most prominent new buildings.  

Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) the newly completed British Museum's World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre is a key piece in the institution's significant extension scheme - which includes the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery, unveiled in March.

The new centre was commissioned in 2007, as a response to the museum's growing needs, both in terms of exhibition space and the protection and upkeep its collection. Now, the museum will have ample and suitably state-of-the-art spaces to store, conserve, study and display its pieces. 'For the first time ever, facilities are properly adapted to the needs of the museum,' says British Museum director Neil MacGregor. This project, which has been almost four years in the making, is not only aiming to highlight the renowned museum as a world leader of exhibitions, but also conservation and study of historical artefacts.

Located in the Bloomsbury complex's northwest corner, the building is set to greatly improve the museum's on site operations. 'Our main task was to solve issues that developed in the museum over the past few years,' explains RSHP's Graham Stirk. The site's preparation began in 2010 and the carefully executed construction work - sensitive to the existing buildings and the museum's irreplaceable collection nearby, and managed by Mace - is now reaching completion, with the final touches currently being added.

Its nine levels (about half of which are nestled underground) include naturally lit conservation rooms, laboratories, studios, offices and extensive modernised services and facilities to support all the various functions. Its truck lift for example, is one of the largest in Europe, while its environmentally controlled storage areas span approximately 5,100 sq m.

True to the practice's tradition, the building features exposed services and is created in a contemporary style, one however, that respects its historical neighbours. 'Yes, we were [intimidated by the context],' says Stirk. But the team worked towards maintaining the street's proportions, breaking down the addition's volume into smaller pavilions, clad in kiln-formed glass and Portland stone as a response to the area's existing material palette.

The British Museum's extension is a thoughtful addition to an iconic London neighbourhood, responding sympathetically to the rhythm and coloration of its surroundings; and developments are still ongoing. Future plans include a green roof across the pavilions, which will include bird nesting boxes and two beehives. 

ADDRESS

World Conservation and Exhibition Centre
Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DG

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Rome’s Maxxi Museum had a troubled gestation, taking its time and courting controversy before ultimately emerging triumphant as a Stirling Prize winner in 2010, one of Zaha Hadid’s best works of the past five years. Now a new show hopes to build on the Maxxi’s archi-credentials by presenting a cavalcade of well-known Italian architects who have built internationally to great acclaim. The show, designed the New York/Naples firm of Lot-Ek, set up in 1993 by Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, snakes through the galleries of the National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, encompassing a broad range of styles, periods and locations.

That breadth of content is unsurprising when you consider the exhibitors. The curators have cast the net wide, taking in the work of such well-known expatriates as the late Pietro Belluschi, Lina Bo Bardi and Paolo Soleri, all responsible, in their own singular ways, for diversifying, fragmenting and exploring different aspects of inter-war modernism in their new-found milieus of big business Manhattan, high culture South America and west coast desert subcultures respectively.

Others include current contemporary favourites Renzo Piano and Studio Fuksas (and the exhibit nods to Richard Rogers’ Italian ancestry as well), while studios as diverse as Delugan Meissl, Djuric-Tardio Architectes, Benedetta Tagliabue and Correia/Ragazzi Arquitectos highlight the global impact and diversity of Italian design talent. The accompanying catalogue includes contributions from journalists, educators and practitioners around the world, including Peter Eisenman, Shumi Bose and Hans Ibelings.

ADDRESS

MAXXI Museum
Via Guido Reni, 4A
Rome

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Marking the architecture titan's 80th birthday, ‘Richard Rogers RA: Inside Out at the Royal Academy of Arts' is a timely revisit of his exceptional body of work – also celebrated in Wallpaper’s July 2013 issue.

The show, curated by the Royal Academy of Arts' consultant curator for architecture, Jeremy Melvin, examines key events and projects in Rogers' life and professional career, introducing the visitor to his beliefs about the importance of collaboration and team work, the key role of architecture and urban design, social responsibility and the need to create a vibrant city for all. ‘No man is an island', announces Rogers in a recorded message in the exhibition's brightly coloured entrance, ‘and neither is a building'. From the influence of his Italian roots to his education at the Architectural Association and Yale and his career onwards, the displays – designed by Rogers' son Ab – offer an interesting insight into Rogers' work and ethos.

Highlighting some of the architect's landmark projects - such as the Pompidou he designed as Rogers + Piano, the Lloyd's Building, the Barajas airport Terminal 4 and the National Assembly for Wales, all created by the Richard Rogers Partnership - the show also includes a wealth of previously unseen notes, sketches, drawings, personal items and ephemera. These are all created by - or linked to - the architect during his over 50-year-long career spanning work as Team 4 (with Norman and Wendy Foster, Su Rogers and Georgie Walton), Richard + Su Rogers, Piano + Rogers, the Richard Rogers Partnership and finally his office in its current form, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. 

The architect might be 80, but he is showing no signs of slowing down, as we proved in our July issue. With a £135m extension to the British Museum, as well as a revival of 22 hectares of a disused container port in Sydney called Barangaroo in the pipeline for Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (among other projects), the architect is still firmly on the rise.

ADDRESS

Royal Academy 
Burlington Gardens
London 

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