Gateway West/Gateway Central – ADC

For Allies and Morrison, London’s White City is an ongoing project. The practice started engaging with its urban condition in 2000, almost 100 years after the bright white painted stuccoed buildings of the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition gave this neighbourhood its name.

By the 1950s most of the exhibition site was replaced by LCC’s White City social housing estate. The final remnant from the earlier time, the 1908 Olympic Stadium, later used for greyhound racing, was replaced by the BBC’s administrative headquarters, designed by Scott Brownrigg & Turner in the 1980s. This doughnut-type colossal object sat somewhat isolated and inward-looking in the corner between Wood Lane and the Westway, until Allies and Morrison started integrating it into its masterplan for the BBC Media Village, which introduced a higher degree of urban thinking to the area and started a long process of urban repair.

Allies and Morrison picked up on the diagonal geometry of the BBC HQ building and integrated it into an urban pattern of new office and production buildings that form and address an elongated public space at their centre. Those buildings relate in height and material to the seven-storey, aluminium-clad HQ building, while lower linear perimeter blocks in brick started a relationship with the adjacent residential blocks. A variety of smaller public spaces created new pedestrian routes and a porous edge sets up links to the existing neighbourhood. The scheme fulfilled the BBC’s ambition for a new working environment that combined open and flexible workspaces with integrated shops, cafés and outdoor spaces for public events, and introduced a degree of urbanity to White City and a shift in focus towards public life.

When the BBC decided to decentralise its operations and sold Media Village to developers Stanhope, Mitsui Fudosan,and AIMCo, Allies and Morrison was recommissioned to take on its own legacy, and in 2015 started transforming Media Village into what is now called White City Place. The new owners’ brief for a front-facing campus for media, technology and creative industries was met by an exemplary exercise in adaptation and sustainable reuse of the existing buildings, as well as the new additions that will be discussed here. Allies and Morrison’s earlier buildings were adapted to become multi-tenanted office buildings, while Scott Brownrigg & Turner’s BBC HQ building, now called The Westworks, underwent more drastic changes. These included the relocation of its entrance to face the landscaped public square, thereby establishing a closer relationship to its neighbours and joining them in serving the public space, as well as opening up their foyer spaces to become universally accessible extensions of the public realm.

The southern end of the original masterplan for the BBC had remained unbuilt and is now in the process of being completed. This site forms a gateway into the campus from White City Station and faces the education and research campus for Imperial College, masterplanned by Allies and Morrison, on the other side of Wood Lane and currently under construction. Three new buildings address the challenge of providing the outward face of White City Place and mediating and connecting the different scales and demographics of the residential, business and educational neighbourhoods. Two of these buildings have now been completed: the 12-storey Gateway Central designed by Allies and Morrison, and the four-storey Gateway West designed by Gort Scott, with the third one, Gateway East, rising up to 21 storeys, also by Allies and Morrison, yet to come.

Jay Gort describes the building as a rock or a keep. It does indeed appear castle-like with its solid base and almost castellated top, created by vertical brick piers that extend up beyond the recessed windows of the upper floors. Despite its relatively small size, it has a strong physical presence and embodies an idea of duration and solidity. Embedded in greenery that is encouraged to grow up the building on the garden side and also cover the plant enclosure on the roof, it might one day appear like an overgrown rock that has been there since long before its neighbours.

The form of the seven-sided building derives from the geometry of the roads that circumscribe the site, yet at strategic places it is consciously faceted or cut back in response to its situation. The building entrance is canted towards the long approach from White City Station and is announced at street level by a recessed entrance porch, and on the upper floors by a large circular window – a conscious homage to Louis Kahn’s Indian Institute

of Management in Ahmedabad. The motif of the circular window is successfully repeated on the narrow northwest façade addressing the other main approach from within White City Place. Here, rather than being cut in half by an office floor, it provides views of and from the building’s second stair.

Otherwise, the architectural language is one of rectangular punched windows that are placed flush at ground level and recessed at varying depths on the upper floors, resulting in solid brick façades animated by shadows. The window sizes have been optimised by balancing requirements for daylight versus overheating in line with passive design principles. By combining them on the two upper floors within a recess between proud vertical brick piers, Gort Scott has created an impression of increased lightness and verticality towards the top, while maintaining the solidity of the building.

What appears as a uniform brick mass from afar reveals itself close up as a brick skin with a variety of different bonding patterns and joint treatments. This doesn’t necessarily add to the architecture, and I am not sure whether it is an attempt at friendly pattern-making to break up a perceived monotony, or a conscious decision to reveal the truth about the brick not being a loadbearing part of the building after all, but, unlike its Kahnian reference, merely a skin cladding a concrete structure.

About half of the ground floor is given to a generous and tall entrance lobby that merges with a shared and informal work area. The remainder of the ground floor accommodates a substantial loading bay with goods lifts that serve the shared basement storage and car park below both Gateway West and Central. Locating the loading bay in the smaller building is an intelligent move that, although resulting in a largely inactive ground floor in Gateway West, increases the active frontage of the neighbouring Gateway Central where its more prominent location makes it arguably more beneficial due to its more prominent location.

At street level, the space between the two buildings above the tunnel connection is conceived as a public route through a beautiful, lush linear garden by Hyland Edgar Driver, the landscape architect responsible for the wider campus. It provides a local shortcut to Tesco’s, extending the landscaped footpaths and courts of the adjacent Wood Lane Estate. This is a calm space with benches for office workers and local residents to sit amongst trees, flanked by the two new buildings.

A small yet generous gesture was made by providing a tiny, glazed room on the western corner that could be used as a kiosk or by a resident artist. The room, carved out from the loading bay area, prevents this side from being perceived as the back and acknowledges the presence of the planned public square opposite. Other such generosities within the building, like the small staff balcony on the top floor, or the wide landing spaces in the naturally lit main stairwell, demonstrate the architects’ care in providing a positive experience for the building users and towards the public realm.

Gort Scott’s initial ambition for a timber structure – as it had already successfully employed on its Hills Road office building in Cambridge – was perceived as too high a fire risk by client and insurers. Instead, a lean concrete frame with high GGBS content is kept exposed, its thermal mass contributing to the mitigation of overheating. Other material decisions were informed by considerations of carbon reduction, long lifespan, and occupant wellbeing. Material choices, such as robust blockwork wall construction, timber floors in shared reception and stairwell areas, and oak window reveals result in very pleasant office spaces with a comfortable solid feel.

The windows on the office floors are particularly successful and can be opened by the users. Tall sliding units on the first floor with sills at seat height become Juliette balconies, while the wider units on the top two floors open above desk height. The possibility of relying purely on natural ventilation during warmer temperatures was tested extensively with environmental engineer Sweco. But the footprint of the building proved too deep and the cooling load resulting from the occupancy levels too high for this to work, despite the exposed concrete structure. Instead, a refreshingly simple green or red light on the core wall now indicates to the occupants when outside temperatures allow for windows to be opened individually for the enjoyment of fresh air without causing heat loss.

The loose-fit flexible layout allows each office floor to be occupied independently or subdivided, potentially providing affordable office space for a multitude of smaller companies. As there is, however, no binding stipulation of where within the Gateway development the required affordable office space is located, one could equally imagine Gateway West becoming the headquarters of one lucky creative company.

Moving up several scales, Allies and Morrison’s Gateway Central represents a continuation of its immediate context of metal-clad office buildings from the Media Village times. It also follows the tradition of modern office architecture described by Mies van der Rohe almost 100 years ago as, “houses of work, of organisation, of clarity, of economy.” A typical ‘skin and bone building’, its fully exposed long-span steel frame, central core, and a meticulously detailed curtain wall aluminium façade create commercial office space of great quality and flexibility. The building form follows the classic tripartite principle of base, middle and top, established by the early modern office buildings of Adler & Sullivan, adjusted here in response to orientation and context.

Two steps in the south façade mediate between the building’s height and that of its neighbours: a setback at level four responds to the scale of the housing estate to the south, as well as to Gateway West, and a further setback at level eight relates to the height of the other office buildings of White City Place. The upper set back is recessed by 1.5 metres on the other three sides which, together with subtle changes in the façade detailing, create a vertical rhythm that enables the top three floors to crown the building. This allows the scheme to be substantially higher than its neighbours and also sets up a geometrical transition to the street. These urban gestures result in two generous roof terraces that contribute to rental income in addition to the wellbeing of the office tenants.

The architectural language of the façade is one of order and repetition, with a layer of ecological consideration added to the Miesian grid expressing the structural order. The office glazing follows a three-metres module, aligning with the larger 9×12 metre structural grid and thereby enabling occasional internal subdivision.

On the south, east and west elevations, each glazing bay includes an insulated panel of dark grey aluminium to prevent overheating. In front of that inner skin, a filigree layer of horizontal aluminium shelves and vertical fins has been added at a slight distance to the glazing. These elements provide shading and give the façades their intricate character; in particular the scalloped shape of the fins is a softening motif that re-appears throughout the building.

A detailing language of gaps between separate elements, of open joints and recessed end pieces that leave the edges of the aluminium sheets exposed, together with subtle differences in the finish of either natural anodised or IGP white powder-coated aluminium, are a manifestation of the quality of thought and care that have gone into the design and the manufacturing of the unitised façade. It reveals to the observer an idea of how the building has been put together and creates a harmony between central concept and detail – a manifestation of what Mies would have called Baukunst.

In terms of spatial and functional treatment, the ground floor is an excellent example of how all floors of an office building can work together in a cohesive way. Rather than being given over to separate commercial units, the ground floor provides active frontage all around that serves the office tenants, a fact that might be partially owed to the development’s more peripheral location in White City rather than the Cities of London or Westminster A large, fully glazed space at the northeast corner houses the cycle store, which is shared by both new buildings and openly communicates the value placed by the developer on sustainable transport and the wellbeing of office workers.

The estate managers have their offices in the adjacent space, easily locatable and visible to tenants through the large shopfront windows. Over a third of the ground floor is used by L’Oreal, who has set up its London headquarters in the top five floors of the building. With a big street presence, it has established the L’Oreal Academy, a flagship educational centre for training hair and beauty professionals.

While the glazed façades to the north and west meet the ground in line with the upper floors, the glazing on the south and east is set back to make space for a colonnade of round aluminium-clad columns. These work as an expression of the steel structure. In spatial terms however, their placement, less than a metre in front of the glazing line, denies pedestrians the pleasure of walking between the columns or being protected from sun or rain. The introduction of this colonnade undeniably grounds the building on these sides and adds a level of decorum towards the residential neighbours. It does, however, feel like a missed opportunity or misappropriation of architectural language, as it turns the corner of the building into White City Place and not quite leads you to the main entrance. Here, the regular column rhythm turns into sets of double columns that relate to the structure above, which in turn accommodates the two setbacks on the upper façades.

There is great rationality at play, which becomes recognisable when stepping away and looking at the building as a whole, but arguably comes at the cost of a more spatially considered and generous entrance sequence. A curved wall, picking up the detail of the aluminium fins above, defines the office entrance and provides a transition from the recessed to the flush ground-floor façade. The entrance is flanked by two picture windows, one to the café on the right, the other to a very beautiful metal stair. This turns necessity – the required additional escape route from the larger footprint of the first three floors – into virtue: a most delightful and healthy route to and from those lower floors.

Entering the tall lobby is a pleasure, its clear spatial arrangement and non-corporate character make it a space you’d like to spend time in. This is supported by an open reception desk near the entrance, a public café to one side, and seating areas for rest or work with beautifully made furniture designed and manufactured for the space – all before you reach the security barriers at the rear. The public realm is thereby extended into the building and the lobby becomes a place available to a greater number of people. It is evident that this is a space designed down to the smallest detail by the architect, continuing the overall concept and architectural language into its interior, rather than by a separate firm of designers that might have treated the lobby as a palimpsest for more or less tasteful decoration. The use of the burgundy window frame colour of Gateway West for some of the interior finishes within the common areas of Gateway Central establishes another playful connection between the two buildings.

Gateway West and Gateway Central were created through real team effort between the two architects, a joint design team, the construction manager Sir Robert Mc Alpine and developer client Stanhope. Gort Scott, who won its commission via invited competition, joined the team just after Gateway Central had started on site, shortly before lockdown. From then on, all design team meetings were held jointly and included the CM and Stanhope. This was time consuming for both architects, but they agree that the collaborative and open book approach with the CM, including jointly made VE decisions, was a positive experience that has led to a satisfying result, especially when compared with typical Design & Build scenarios.

The physical environment they have created is a testament to the alignment of the client’s and design team’s values towards striking a balance between private and public interests. It seems evident that the client’s support and long-term ambition for sustainable and civic placemaking at White City were instrumental in the project’s success. Both buildings are examples of truly sustainable architecture that is made to last and can adapt and witness the evolution of our lives in a civil way. It is as much about making places and buildings people want to use and care for, as it is about technical mastery. Most importantly, there is no contradiction in this project between architecture and the city. This is architecture that sees itself as part of the city and its primary task of providing efficient and comfortable workspace is not at odds with a wider responsibility for serving public space and creating a setting for public life. Gateway West and Gateway Central are two pieces of a larger plan that sets out to mediate between a fragmented 20th century past and a future which will hopefully witness White City as a place of connectedness.