I first met the Lloyd’s building way back in ’84. I was working as bag carrier for Maestro Richard Bryant FRIBA; holding dark slides, warming polaroid, sweeping up litter, watching the (as yet unfinished) building resolved in Richard’s wonderful photographs.
Of course when the Lloyd’s Building opened in 1986, people lost their minds. Some in a good way, some in a bad way. It was like London had ordered a sensible new office building and, by some clerical error, received a giant piece of sculpture instead. An artist’s fevered dream, that had wandered into the middle of London and decided to stay. There it was, all steel and glass, with its guts—pipes, elevators, staircases—hanging on the outside like it had been turned inside out by a particularly mischievous god. As though Stanley Kubrick had made a sci-fi movie about a future where insurance brokers are the new astronauts, an other worldly intercession, a cultural negotiation, designed to bring us all to a higher consciousness.
Richard Rogers, and the extraordinary team of talents around him, had already pulled off a similar trick in Paris with the Pompidou Centre, a building that looks like a power plant but is somehow full of art. My father had taken me to Beaubourg when it opened in ’77. Wide eyed and awestruck, to me it really felt like the future. It many ways it guided my choice of career in photography, being part of the spirit that created Centre Pompidou felt like a good way to spend a life.
Architectural photographers love this building, and you can see why. It is impossible to take a boring picture of it. Every angle gives you a different combination of materials and surfaces, geometry and texture, Of course the building is taking the pictures for you, but don’t let that stop you congratulating yourself.
Whether you love it or loathe it, the Lloyd’s Building is impossible to ignore. Like a glyph, a ghost or reflection from an alternative future that never quite arrived, a glimpse into a possible universe that we weren’t courageous enough to build. For me it will always be a poignant building, something significant, a building that demanded we all do better and was, perhaps, a little too confident in our capacity to reply.
