Lloyd's (or Lloyd's of London) is an insurance market that could lay claim to being the prime mover in creating the concept of insurance as is widely understood[1] and is named after a coffee house that was run by Edward Lloyd. The original coffee shop became a meeting point for those involved in the maritime trade and they came to share information about shipping which was used for offering insurance. Insurance is just about managing risk by pooling those risks so that it benefits more people. By pooling that risk, catastrophe can be more effectively managed. If 5% of 20 ships will sink, that might not seem so bad but if it happens to be your ship - you will take 100% of the loss. So, the effect of that risk is different if you have one of twenty total ships or if you have twenty ships yourself. Pooling that risk means that everyone pays a little bit more but nobody loses out entirely and as it is pretty random who that 5% will afflict, it seems like a low cost. So the financial risk is, effectively identical, but the real risk to individual participants is reduced.
Insurance works, but pooling risks only happens if you actually have multiple risks to pool and for that you needed people to be pooled together to be able to meet and strike these agreements. That happened at Lloyd's Coffee House - it was a prime example of the benefits of mixing people together.
Fast forward a few years, or a few centuries, to 1986 and a new building was completed for the market in the City of London. A building that split opinion and also, 25 years hence, became the youngest Grade I listed structure[2] in the UK. Why did it split opinion? Because that is what modern architecture does and this structure was very modern. Like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, this building was "inside-out".
In many ways, we have to think about what the purpose of a building is and Le Corbusier, famously, described homes as machines for living. If we think about it in that way, then it allows us to reassess what the purpose of components that make up a building are. At the most basic level, you need walls and a roof but that does not quite scale up when you have larger buildings with the requirements of infrastructure. Traditional buildings have external walls that do two things - structurally hold the building up and provide shelter from the elements. Walls can be load bearing or simply partitions and that is the difference in looking at the purpose of the walls. What if we split that responsibility out a little, you could have something else that was better at holding a building up and a separate something else that was better for providing shelter. Once you separate that out, you can start having load-bearing structures that don't need to look good as they are hidden away and facades that are better for the inhabitants - this gave us the glass skyscrapers with central cores. Glass lets light in and makes a nicer environment for those inside the building. Many traditionalists in the world of newspaper columns don't seem to think buildings are for anything other than looking at from afar, however, and so changes in technology are not always seen positively. What a central core also allowed was for all the "services" (such as lift cores, utility supply etc)to be put into that central core and then allowing the space between the glass frontage and the central core to be pretty open - giving large open spaces. This centralised load-bearing structure soon became the new tradition of building skyscrapers.
What, however, could we do if we could also move that central core outside the building to leave an open, unbroken space? The benefits of an unbroken, easily adaptable space were clear for tenants of a building and that is what drew Lloyd's to the vision given by Richard Rogers as he persuaded the decision makers over to his way of thinking. Another benefit of an approach like this, a sort of exoskeleton for a building, is that the maintenance of these previously hidden things is made much quicker and easier as a result of being accessible. Maybe most famously for the Lloyd's building, the lifts are placed outside the building and that just happens to afford great views of the City of London - I assume that this is a positive unintended consequence. Does the building work for the inhabitants? Over thirty years on, that answer seems to be a clear "yes" but you have to think of stakeholders and the external view of something is important in such a central location in one of the best-known cities in the world. Well, unsurprisingly, this has been a success too - it will never be a universally loved building but it is one that fewer and fewer people are against now.
I'm not that interested in architecture - not enough to write about anyway which seems an odd thing to say after a few hundred words about a building. The point, however, is about the idea of thinking of design in a new way. Taking a step back to see the purpose of a building rather than what had gone before it seems like a sensible way of approaching problems and maybe we should all try to get back to first principles every so often to appraise what we do. I am also a big fan of making things easily accessible to make changes to when required. At work, I do a fair amount of calculation models and it is always important that we can see what is going into those - the inputs have to be clear[3] and externalised so that you can change them easily. So that others can maintain them rather than hiding away the working components. Eventually, people get used to the look and it becomes a house style. That's what I have learned from Richard Rogers' groundbreaking building.
1. Although this may not, semi-famously, be all that well understood by some high ranking people in US politics such as Paul Ryan (amongst many, many other Republicans).↩
2. Listing structures in the UK involves giving the architecture certain types of protection and many owners would not like this to happen as it necessitates conservation which may not always be what the owner wants to do.↩
3. The Pompidou Centre, which came before the Lloyd's building, by Rogers and Renzo also externalised the structures but went one step further by colour coding the infrastructure lines to give clear indications how things worked. In some ways, like a diagram rather than real life.↩
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