There is a particular difficulty in photographing architecture that occupies a preexisting masterplan. The ghosts of earlier intentions linger in the grid. One does not begin with a blank page but with an argument already underway. The question is whether the new voice can enter that argument without raising its volume.
What Perkins&Will have done here is exercise a steadying hand, working in close partnership with a highly knowledgeable client team. To integrate three buildings, two deeply refurbished and one newly formed by FIA – Fenwick Iribarren Architects, within a living corporate organism is a complex undertaking. It demands technical discipline and emotional intelligence in equal measure, supported by informed client insight and collaborative decision-making. One must read the existing fabric closely, accept its limitations, and locate within it the latent opportunities for transformation.
The original concrete and masonry are not erased. They are allowed to remain legible, forming a background against which new interventions register. As a photographer, I look for the moment when old and new converse without friction. Here the dialogue is calm. Timber linings, white planes and reflective surfaces do not attempt to compete with the inherited structure. They temper it. Light is drawn deeper into the floor plates with a precision that feels surgical. The effect is not theatrical but steady, an architecture of measured luminosity rather than spectacle.
Calm here is an architectural virtue. Circulation is intuitive. Material hierarchies are disciplined. The renewed and the repurposed are integrated with a sensitivity that avoids nostalgia. The past is acknowledged, not fetishised. The future is anticipated, welcomed.
What interests me most is the opportunity the architects have created for expression within constraint. The existing volumes are generous, even austere. Within them Perkins and Will have inserted moments of sculptural clarity, instances where form bends or curves against the rectilinear frame. These gestures are controlled, almost reticent, yet they provide a counterpoint that animates the whole. It is expressive architecture born of intelligence.
The project rewards patience. It reveals itself incrementally, through alignment, proportion and careful calibration. There is compassion in that approach. A recognition that 4,000 people will inhabit these spaces daily, and that architecture at this scale must sustain rather than overwhelm.
In the end, the campus feels less like a reinvention than a clarification. The preexisting masterplan has been reread and refined. The new interventions do not shout. They hold their ground with assurance. For a photographer, and for anyone attentive to the slow intelligence of built form, that composure is the most persuasive quality of all.
Awarded the WAF Interiors Workplace (Large) Award.
