London’s Channel 4 was founded in 1982 primarily to commission and air programs and films that had been created elsewhere by independent producers and to directly compete with large corporations, such as the BBC. By the late 1980s, the company employed more than 500 people whose offices were dispersed among several buildings in Bloomsbury. In 1990 the station decided to move to a single building that could handle the large number of employees as well as the channel’s changing technological needs, brought about by its shift to digital broadcasting. Richard Rogers Partnership, a London firm, won the commission, and the resulting design, with its sense of openness and references to modern media technology, fit the image of a company known for its progressive, sometimes radical, programming.

The building is situated on a corner lot in Westminster, midway between the Houses of Parliament and Victoria Station. Targeted for housing, the site became available when the developer went bankrupt, and the borough of Westminster approved the use of the site by Channel 4 as long as the scheme included a certain number of residential flats. The competition brief also stipulated other requirements, such as 15,000 square meters of flexible office space, conference rooms, viewing and editing rooms, an underground parking garage, and a public garden.

The site plan consists of four rectangular blocks that surround a central landscaped garden. The southern and eastern wings—designed by Lyons Sleeman and Hoare, not Rogers—are the required residential blocks, consisting of 100 apartments. Rogers’s input on the design of the flats was ignored after this portion of the site was sold to a separate developer to raise money for Channel 4, which occupies the northern and western wings. The L-shaped layout of these two blocks, each four stories high and containing the offices, echoes the street-corner location of the building. They are joined by a soaring concave, glass-enclosed foyer containing the main entrance, accessible once one walks up a stepped ramp that leads from the street through a paved piazza. A lightweight glass bridge, covered by a steeland-glass canopy, allows the visitor to peer down into the station’s underground quarters. The basement space is a vestige of an earlier building whose construction had begun in the 1970s but had never been completed. The entrance facade is flanked by a tall vertical tower, topped by television antennae and containing the building’s utilities as well as the elevators, whose movements are visible from the street.

On entering the curved reception area that links the two wings, one can see past it to a glass-walled public restaurant, several steps down from the entranceway. The open design—penetrated by red steel supports for the entrance canopy—allows the visitor immediately to see all the way through to the central garden area that lies behind the building. The steel cables and rods that support the curving glass entrance wall are slender yet clearly visible in the central atrium of the building. The upper floor of the concave portion of the building contains sliding-glass doors that lead from executive offices to a terrace that offers views to the garden below and overlooks the surrounding Westminster area.

Engineered by Ove Arup and Associates, the building is constructed on a concrete frame with gray aluminum cladding. The Arup firm developed an innovative technique to hang the curving glass wall from steel supports. The main structural elements are painted the same red as the supports for the entrance canopy, and the exterior walls of the office wings are almost fully glazed, serving two important purposes for the architect. First, it ensures that the horizontal traffic patterns of the people inside the building are visible, complementing the evident vertical movements of the lifts, both of which are meant to expose and highlight the constant activity and energy of the building’s users. Second, Rogers’s extensive use of glass walls in the Channel 4 Headquarters reveals his interest in transparency—the glazed entrance wall, for example, functions as a screen through which the visitor can see a series of windowed walls and glass blocks. The view is one of an overlapping sequence of metal and glass that continues until the eye is led through the final glazed wall of the ground-floor restaurant. Rogers intended the visitor to be drawn toward the building by noting the dynamism of its moving elements (such as the elevators) from afar and then visually to peel away each layer and each successive screen by moving through the building. The use of materials that appear light allows for complex, interpenetrating layers while still maximizing the views through and out of the building. The visual lightness was also meant to reduce the effect of a large office building’s being placed in an already dense area of the city.

The obvious precedent, both aesthetically and conceptually, for the Channel 4 Headquarters is Rogers’s formulation of a high-tech architecture as manifested in his Pompidou Center in Paris (1977, designed with Renzo Piano) and the Lloyd’s Building (1987), his only other work in central London. Although smaller than these earlier works, the Channel 4 building reveals many of the same interests and concerns; the exposed steelwork in all three structures, the exterior lifts in the two London buildings and the Pompidou’s external escalators, and the flexibility of the interior spaces call to mind the machine imagery and functionalist rhetoric of the early Modern movement. Rogers is part of a continuum that includes early 20th-century celebrations of the machine age as well as the futurist projects of the 1960s British collective, Archigram, whose interest in an adaptable architecture is paralleled in Rogers’s work. The design for the Channel 4 Headquarters includes the possibility of reworking the interior space should the building someday serve a new tenant while still ensuring that the overall design housing the changeable aspects remains unchanged.

DEBORAH LEWITTES

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.1 (A-F).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2004.

Awards:

1996 BBC Design Awards Finalist

1995 RIBA National Award

1995 Royal Fine Art Commission Award