British high tech-nique: while many tall buildings seek to impose new forms on the city with radical new shapes, 122 Leadenhall Street has rationally negotiated its place, adding the best part of a million square feet gross with true style and finesse.

There is ... as can be seen from a glance of the plan ... [a] matter of
factness about the way in which they add and subtract components ...
they still have the delight and the initiative of the inventive
schoolboy. The dare. The chance. So that when a piece of city territory
suggests that you can drop the tentacles of the WonderMachine into the
leftover spaces ... then you do it. The good sense to make a piece of
commonsense planning--fundamentally the Louis Kahn formula of served
space and service tubes around it--and to ally that with an extruded
British greenhouse. This would be lost on many clever-clever architects.
They would want to make more of a meal of the basic planning. PETER COOK

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The City of London is no stranger to innovative office buildings. Within its haphazard and largely unplanned medieval grain it hosts some of Europe's most celebrated corporate structures by Seifert, Stirling, Rogers, and Foster. Among these, the Richard Rogers Partnership has developed the most consistent approach and recognisable language of expression in the City, articulating the office type as a vertical organisation of discrete functional elements and bringing British High-Tech deep into the height of the City. Recalling contemporary observations of Lloyd's, Reyner Banham made particular mention of the practice's rational and demystified design process, (AR October 1986). Martin Pawley saw it as a building that could sail boldly into the eye of technological change, confronting obsolescence as a key threat. And Colin Davies introduced the phenomenon of Rogers' omniplatz; a flexible, fully serviced open-plan space. Few were unaffected by the impact of Lloyd's and since then each subsequent RRP building has applied the knowledge of lessons learnt. Consistently demonstrating how its formula could be adapted for unique sites, the architect's elemental composition is capable of adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of almost any urban situation. While the next building for Lloyd's, the Register of Shipping, stitched together a complex piece of city, engaging with a number of listed buildings, 88 Wood Street (AR February 2001) was described as one of the most distinguished, generous and humanly scaled post-war office buildings in the City, stepping from 10 to 14 to 18 storeys to produce three elegant wings, instead of one cumbersome hulk. 122 Leadenhall Street raises the game over 50 storeys with a building that challenges the stylistic pretensions of contemporary rival developments through a literal and thematic extension of RRP's High-Tech lineage. While the excerpt taken from Peter Cook's AR October 1986 article on Lloyd's does not relate specifically to this project, it could easily be reapplied today.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When project director Graham Stirk talks with characteristic modesty, the assured knowledge, experience and expertise that he and his team have acquired over the past twenty five years is easily overlooked. Joining Rogers as a graduate on Lloyd's in 1983, Stirk is now one of three principal partners in the recently renamed practice, Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners. Having worked on all three City offices, he speaks from direct experience about the most challenging and rewarding aspect of working with the eccentricities of the City of London. Recalling an observation made by former City of London planning officer, Peter Rees, Stirk believes that specificity is key. In situations like Docklands, where constraints and planning regulations were virtually eliminated in an attempt to increase diversity of type, precisely the opposite result emerged as apparently liberated developers and architects defaulted to the sort of slavish attitude to economics and efficiency that stifles lateral thinking and true creativity. In Stirk's view, more obligations produce more diverse results, and have helped his team to produce spaces that hit all commercial targets while also having the quality and ambience that brings immeasurable added value.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Extending the practice's technique that derives sophistication in section from simplicity in plan, the configuration of 122 Leadenhall Street separates served and servant spaces to optimise escape distances and fire engineering requirements. Fire fighting shafts double-up as usable accommodation access cores, non-active lift lobbies house lavatories, and an unprotected service structure greatly reduces steel weights; all of which help produce impressive efficiencies in floor area and material use.

Above a dramatic seven-storey plaza that makes almost the entire plot accessible to the public, each ascending floor plate diminishes by 750mm to produce the distinctive wedge-shaped silhouette that maintains all important protected views to St Paul's, and offers greater flexibility to attract a wide range of future tenants. Using increased mass to define the plaza, and with its elegant tapering tip, this building exemplifies how towers can make a positive contribution to both the groundline and skyline. As an axial beacon on the horizon and with its place-making base, 122 Leadenhall is anchored to its site far more meaningfully than many of the more self-conscious, self-centred, and shapely towers that have planning consent.

In 1986, Banham described Rogers' technique as an article of faith in the new High-Tech. Twenty-five years later, with completion anticipated in 2010, Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners' Leadenhall building is set to provide another exemplary model to outshine the mediocre 'clever-clever' designs by the blessed shape-makers who seem intent on making more of a meal of basic planning. While the British High-Tech was without doubt a highly stylised language of architecture, it was also a technique, a belief and a process-led attitude to design. It represented an architectural discipline through which, in the true sense of the word, style was derived as the outcome of a rigorous approach to problem solving, through rationalisation, optimisation and a sprinkle of formal finesse. From the images seen here, 122 Leadenhall Street is set to take High-Tech higher still.