Opened in 1986, the Lloyd’s Building was designed to be flexible and able to accomodate change – a reflection of the Big Bang that was sweeping the City of London

When the Lloyd’s Building was listed at Grade I – the same level as St Paul’s Cathedral – in 2011, a mere 25 years after its completion, it became the youngest protected building in Britain. Its architect, Richard Rogers, remained oddly quiet. This curious silence might be explained by the intriguing discrepancy between the architect’s ideas and ideals and the flattery of recognition.

Like all of Mr Rogers’ greatest buildings, Lloyd’s was designed to accommodate flexibility and change, to acknowledge the radical transformations in technology and communications. It opened in 1986, the City’s Big Bang year.

This adaptability is the diametric opposite of the strictures of historic building protection. So what made the building so important and is it right to protect it and negate what was most original about it?

The answer is yes to both.

Mr Rogers’ masterpiece had been the Centre Pompidou in Paris, opened in 1977, a stunning realisation of radical 1960s ideas of a flexible urban architecture in which a sci-fi megastructure allows a responsive, reprogrammable interior through building the structure and services on the outside, leaving the interior free and transformable.

The Lloyd’s Building was a development of those ideas. When seen from Horace Jones’s Leadenhall Market, the Lloyd’s Building smoothly mediates between the elegance of Victorian engineering, the slick efficiency of mid-century modernism and the eclectic streetscape of the City. But with its colourful cranes and glass lifts moving up the outside it looks like a machine for making money.

Mr Rogers was criticised both for selling out his socialist ideals by building for big business (he later designed One Hyde Park, the most expensive block of flats in the world) and for an inside-out aesthetic that became semi-affectionately known as Bowellism. He was parodied on the satirical show Spitting Image as a puppet with his guts and organs throbbing on the desk in front of him.

Yet the subsequent development of the City has shown the Lloyd’s Building to be a brilliant and resilient sculptural masterpiece which manages to maintain a balance between its dense, historic surroundings, its transplanted historic interiors and the rapidly changing cityscape around it.

The escalator-crossed atrium is one of London’s most theatrical spaces and the building appears as surprising and as seductive today as it did when it opened.

by Edwin Heathcote

> via FinancialTimes