The city in the wilderness.

Niels Torp's new corporate headquarters for British Airways has clear parallels with his earlier seminal building for SAS. Both generate an intricate spatial matrix for the variety and activity of working life.

Harmondsworth has from time immemorial been a godforsaken place. Traditionally a barren moor to the west of London stalked by highwaymen and splattered with a few dingy hamlets, it was colonized in the nineteenth century by sporadic and dowdy suburbs. In the second half of the twentieth, two motorways sliced through it, leaving between a barren swath largely used as a rubbish dump. The name (though not the place) was only known to the wider world as the original headquarters of the Penguin publishing company.

The adjacent desolate moor was Heathrow, now the world's busiest international airport, and Harmondsworth has been made much more prosperous (though scarcely more accessible or pleasant) by eruptions of airport-related industries in rashes of dumb sheds, squat PoMo hotels and office blocks. In the middle of this scabrous mess is a new building which has astonishingly set standards not only for the blasted heath and England, but for everyone.

British Airways (BA) decided to consolidate many of its headquarters functions in the early '90s and found that it had owned some 40 acres (16 ha) of land about a mile west of Heathrow, its hub airport, for at least a decade. Application to the local authority, Hillingdon, to consolidate the activities of existing BA offices in central and suburban London within one complex which could house 2800 people was granted permission - provided that an extra 240 acres (97 ha) of polluted (but curiously wildlife rich) dump and gravel workings were developed as a park for the benefit of the public.

The international competition for the building was won by Niels Torp, who was asked to take part after the great success of his SAS headquarters in Stockholm (AR March 1989). There, Torp had formed the whole huge 1500 person organization along an internal skylit street, with communal facilities like meeting rooms, cafe, shops and other recreational facilities facing the (semi) public space on the ground floor, with five quasi-independent four to seven floor butterfly-plan pavilions opening off it. In these, every worker had a room overlooking either the fine landscaped park or the luminous street. Each individual office opened off a group space for communal discussion and each pavilion had a clearly defined entrance from the street. In a sense, a humane and intricate spatial matrix for working life is offered, ranging from the varied public concourse of the street, through the intimate local group space to the privacy of the personal cell. As Frank Duffy said at the time, 'the SAS building proclaims a vision of how creative people can be invited to work independently and yet co-operate with others on common tasks'.(1)

Torp's BA building is in many ways a bigger and richer version of the one for SAS. But comparison can be too glib. At Harmondsworth, the building (and its principal client Bob Ayling, the chief executive of BA) had to cope with some of the prime shibboleths of Anglo-Saxon capitalism:(2) for instance that a company which builds its own headquarters has become too fat; that any private space for an individual (except the highest management) is counter productive; that, while of course the staff should be given some measure of communal space (perhaps no more than round a vending machine), time spent away from the individual workstation or formal meeting room is essentially time wasted.

The clack-bottomed accountant's objection to a whole building being created by one company for its own use has been met by ensuring that each or all of the six U-shaped pavilions which are reached from the central space can be let off separately. Each floor could be separate too. Even if every part were to be occupied by different organizations, the communal spaces would be still there, and could be used by everyone. (Indeed, they might function rather better as social spaces.)

The big street, with its well-grown olive and ficus trees and generous terraced cafe piazza in the middle, has a clear corporate purpose. The public spaces, even apparently redundant little terraces and balconies, are all busy with conversation. Of course, some of this must be gossip, but some must surely lead (at least sometimes) to the serendipity of free-flowing casual chat which modern management hopes will generate creativity on behalf of the company.

There is a similar calm geniality and generosity about the whole place. It greets you at the front door, after you have battled through the drear and confusing absurdities of Harmondsworth. Following the hassle, the heavily planted approach and parking areas are soothing. A paved forecourt generously embraces and conducts you to the entrance. As soon as you are in, the dignity and nobility of the long glazed space become apparent. But this is not a Baths of Caracalla or Lord Copper-like awesome volume, but a light-hearted, light-filled route, packed with incident, conducted by a flowing stream, its axis focused on practically the only other decent building in the whole of Harmondsworth, The Great Barn, a monumental medieval storehouse of the community's agricultural riches. The BA building is perhaps our equivalent, but its treasures are (or ought to be) those of electronically assisted minds, rather than ones devoted to sheer subsistence.

The building is limited to four storeys by Heathrow's height restrictions.(3) Vertical circulation stacks create a strong rhythm down the street. The place is made constantly lively by the traffic of people along the street itself, in the galleries on each side and the bridges that connect them across the axis. As well as the central cafe, the 175m long street is lined with shops, a bank and other general purpose functions. It ends at a great glass wall under which the stream appears to flow out to a big lake across which lies the barn.

On each side of the street, the six semi-independent buildings form courts which open into the wider landscape that usually rises as mounds to partly shield the spaces from people wandering around in the park. Each court is different in form: Torp continually elaborates his belief that a large complex should be a lattice of particular places.(4) Each building or house is named after one of the airline's main destinations: the Orient, Africa, Australasia, Europe and so on. Each is signalled to the street by the flashy designs that BA has adopted on the tail fins of its planes, and the courts are elegantly landscaped with appropriate flora by Richard Hannay of Land Use Consultants curiously, the fragile, delicate gardens look as if they will last a lot longer, and be much more loved than the graphics. Each house is served from the street by sets of stairs and by three lifts: two passenger and one goods; each is largely separately serviced.

Three special pavilions are formed as part of the courtyards: restaurant, auditorium and medical centre. The restaurant is the most interesting - it sticks out from the north-east corner of the complex into the lake and, though it can cater for 725 people at once, it offers such a wide variety of different places,(5) views, experiences (both inside, and out on the decks) that it is almost the antithesis of the works canteen, which is after all what the place is set up to be.

From the decks of the restaurant, you can look back over the building and reflect. Externally, it is very modest - Torp at his best is about place and space, not figure. There are no flashy gestures,(6) just plain cream limestone, grey powder-coated aluminium window frames with a continue of rather conventional curtain walling (none of the look-no-frames plane glass beloved of British High-Tech). The result, and the surrounding park, recall the chasteness of eighteenth-century Palladian architecture, with the clear cut artefact set against nature apparently mown by the hand of God into agreeable vistas defined by gently rounded eminences.

Further reflection leads to questions. This is undoubtedly a fine building, most sensitively executed. The quality is clear: think for instance of the materials of the street, the stone flags and setts, of the landscaping both inside and out, of the artworks by people as distinguished and inventive as Andy Goldsworthy and Arne Ase. But at the same time, it is the embodiment of a power system every bit as frightening to individuals as that of the eighteenth-century oligarchy. Like the servants of a Georgian squire, people who work for BA are cut off from the rest of society (at least during the day) by the drear dumb desert of Hounslow.

The building type - out-of-town corporate headquarters in which the management has almost total control of every aspect of the workers' lives - is very familiar across the Atlantic, and is becoming increasingly so in the rest of the world. I find it very hard to believe that, for instance, hot desking with its lack of personal territory really empowers the individual.(7) Or in the end that all those casual conversations which are so encouraged in the cafe and balconies are not being (at least sometimes) supervised.

Torp has grasped the paradoxes of the programme with great verve and done all that an architect can to make tenderness, generosity and kindliness out of the harshness of late twentieth-century capitalism. He has created a building that is decent, relaxed, welcoming and even comforting - a piece of humane city - in the midst of a physical and metaphorical godforsaken heath.

1 AR March 1989, p45. See p44 of this issue for Duffy's assessment of the BA building and the organization of its office areas.

2 It is inconceivable that an Anglo-Saxon chief executive should say that he wants to 'govern with love, respect and trust' as Jan Carlzon, the chief executive of SAS, did when he commissioned the pioneering building at Frosundavik. Love is conspicuously missing in British business relationships.

3 One of the few times that Torp allows himself to express dissatisfaction with working in Britain is when he ruefully recalls the original project for a gazebo above the roof in the middle of the plan from which the whole of Heathrow's amazing activities could have been surveyed, Hillingdon was adamant that the height restrictions should be rigorously obeyed

4 Which he first demonstrated brilliantly in Aker Brygge, the conversion of a defunct shipyard in the centre of Oslo into a new, rich and vigorous part of the inner city (AR August 1990).

5 And indeed eating styles, from standing at a counter to sitting down for a four course lunch with all the works

6 This is an improvement on Aker Brygge, where Torp felt the need to derive forms from sources as different as Rossi and Erskine to create a varied townscape.

7 But see p44.