London's inside-out Lloyd's building won top protection and a hefty repair bill
Richard Rogers put the stairs, lifts, ducts and water pipes of the Lloyd's building on the outside, leaving the interior wide open. In 2011 it became the youngest structure ever given Grade I listing. By 2014 the cost of maintaining all that weather-beaten plumbing had Lloyd's thinking about moving out.
Lloyd's of London had outgrown its 1928 home on Leadenhall Street, designed by Sir Edwin Cooper, and a 1958 addition across the road on Lime Street. A 1978 competition drew entries from Foster Associates, Arup and I. M. Pei, and Rogers won. The Cooper building was demolished except for its entrance, which survives as an odd appendage, and Queen Elizabeth II opened the new structure on 18 November 1986. The site had once held East India House.
The style, sometimes called Bowellism, follows the same logic as the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which Rogers designed with Renzo Piano, and both owe a debt to the Archigram group of the 1950s and 1960s. Three main towers and three service towers surround a rectangular core. At its heart is the Underwriting Room, home to the Lutine Bell and a loss book in which major losses have been written by quill for 300 years. Galleries rise around it to form a 60-metre atrium under a barrel-vaulted glass roof. No British building had used glass lifts before its dozen external ones.
The roof sits 88 metres up across 14 floors, and cleaning cranes on the service cores lift the total to 95.10 metres. Floors are modular, so partitions can be moved as needs change. Oddest of all, the 11th floor holds the Committee Room, an 18th-century dining room Robert Adam designed in 1763 for the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, moved piece by piece from the 1958 building.
Critics including King Charles disliked it at first, and Rogers answered that Lloyd's had asked for durability and adaptability. The Twentieth Century Society pushed for top listing in 2008, and Historic England now calls it one of the defining buildings of the modern age. Ownership passed from a German bank to Dublin's Shelbourne Development Group in 2004 and to China's Ping An Insurance for 260 million pounds in July 2013. Former chief executive Richard Ward summed up the drawback: everything is exposed, and exposure is expensive.
Source: Lloyd's building
