Architecture, culture, adventure and maturity.
A new building is completing on one of London’s most prominent sites and judgement, inevitably, will follow.
That judgement will change. Fashion passes quickly; cities less so. Uses alter, institutions move, economies shift, and streets acquire different populations and different meanings. The more interesting question is whether the architecture possesses sufficient intelligence, generosity and substance to remain useful as those conditions change.
Context is often more complicated than resemblance. A building neighbouring St Pancras does not honour its neighbour by borrowing Gothic affectations, nor does respect for King’s Cross require a pastiche of Lewis Cubitt. The more useful questions concern structure, material economy, civic presence, adaptability, and the confidence with which buildings accommodate purposes their architects could not foresee.
Belgrove House began with a particular ambition, expressed by architect Simon Allford as the desire to make “a delightful architectural landmark generous enough to accommodate an unknown future.”
That matters. It was never conceived simply as a laboratory, an office building or a headquarters, but as architecture capable of becoming each of those things: a place for research, work and collaboration; a single headquarters; or a building occupied by several organisations.
The building has attracted a strikingly varied group of prospective occupants, including a leading global university and major technology businesses, each recognising within it the possibility of making a headquarters of their own.
This is not incidental to the architecture. It is already evidence of the proposition on which the building was designed. Before completion, Belgrove House has been required to absorb changes of programme, institution and ambition without surrendering its architectural identity. That capacity may prove considerably more important than fidelity to the first use imagined for it.
Belgrove House now enters the more interesting part of its life. Its measure will not be whether it perfectly accommodates a single predetermined occupant, but whether different organisations can recognise themselves within it, alter it, inhabit it, and leave it useful for whoever comes next.
A city produced to satisfy a narrow band of taste and ambition would soon become strangely anonymous: bland, deferential and difficult to remember. London has always been more interesting, and more confident, than that.
The past is not a set of instructions. It is an accumulation of intelligence, invention, error, ambition and adaptation. Our responsibility is to understand the past properly, while addressing the future rationally, comprehensively and with confidence.
Belgrove House was designed with uncertainty in mind: an architectural landmark generous enough to accommodate an unknown future, and robust enough to remain useful as that future arrives.
