THINKGREEN

The country headquarters for insurance company Willis Faber & Dumas challenged accepted thinking about the office building while simultaneously maintaining a sense of continuity within the context of its provincial setting. The unprecedented use of escalators in a three-storey structure, the central atrium, and the social dimension offered by its swimming pool, roof-top garden and restaurant, were all conceived in a spirit of democratising the workplace and engendering a sense of community. Outside, in contrast, the building reinforces rather than confronts the urban grain, with its free-form plan and low-rise construction responding to the to the scale of surrounding buildings, while its curved facade maintains a relationship to the medieval street pattern. Floors are planned on a 14-metre-square structural grid, flexible enough to respond to the ad hoc acquisition of the site and to allow for a number of early plan configurations. A necklace of perimeter columns ...