The building was unpopular before it was finished. That much is documented: the local paper ran a competition to name it, and the winning entry was not affectionate. Forty years later the same block is on a protection list, the cafés underneath it have a waiting list, and the two towers built next to it in the boom years are already being reclad for the second time.
None of this makes it a good building. It does make the original argument worth reopening, because most of what was said against it turned out to describe the photographs rather than the place.
It was never as heavy as it looked
Photographed from the road with a long lens, the facade reads as a single mass. Standing under it, the plan is almost entirely edges. The structure is a perimeter frame with the floor plates hung back from it, which means every office sits between two external walls and the corridor never runs along glass. The depth that reads as bulk in an elevation is what gives every desk daylight from two sides.
Contemporary critics called it inward-looking. In use it is the opposite: the ground floor is open on three sides, and the fourth is a service yard that the council has since half-glazed. The mistake was not the massing. It was that the only images anybody saw were taken before the landscaping went in.
The details that failed were the cheap ones
Where the building genuinely aged badly, the cause is boring and consistent. The concrete has done fine. The things bolted to it have not.
- The original window gaskets were a proprietary system, discontinued within a decade, and replaced piecemeal with whatever matched.
- Rainwater was taken down internal stacks with no access panels, so the first leak became a wall repair rather than a plumbing job.
- The paving to the north terrace was laid on a screed that was never intended to be walked on in winter boots.
Every one of those is a value-engineering decision from the last six months of the job, and none of them is a consequence of the architecture. The lesson practices actually take from buildings like this is not “avoid concrete.” It is that the specification loses its nerve at exactly the point when nobody is watching any more.
On the record The 1987 condition survey put the structural frame at “no significant deterioration” and the window system at “end of serviceable life.” Those two lines, thirty-nine years apart in their expectations, were written on the same page.
Reuse is easier here than in its replacements
The tower that went up beside it in the late nineties has a floor-to-floor height of 3.1 metres, a fully sealed facade, and a services strategy that assumes mechanical ventilation forever. Converting it to housing means a new facade and a new riser layout — effectively a new building behind a retained frame.
The concrete block has 3.9 metres, openable windows, and a structural grid generous enough to take a residential plan without touching the frame. When the council finally ran the numbers on both, the unloved building came out cheaper to convert per square metre, and by a margin that surprised everyone except the engineers.
That is the part worth sitting with. The building was designed with a tolerance for uses nobody had thought of yet, and that tolerance was mostly accidental — a by-product of a structural logic chosen for other reasons. Its neighbours were optimised, and optimisation is what makes a building hard to change.
What it is actually bad at
It should be said plainly: the building is confusing to enter. There are three doors and no hierarchy between them. The main stair is beautiful and almost impossible to find from the lobby. Wayfinding has been added four times, each layer arguing with the last.
Acoustically, the double-height spaces are a problem that no amount of soft furniture has fixed. And the north elevation, whatever the drawings intended, gets no useful sun and never will.
These are real faults. They are also the sort of faults you fix with a competent refurbishment, which is what is now happening — thirty-nine years after a building was condemned in print for looking the way it looks.
