Virtual Building Tour – 1 Finsbury Avenue

Image by Timothy Soar

After a two-year curtailment of the AIA live building tours due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK chapter resumed its in-person events on 10 February 2022.  The first tour of the 2022 series was a walkthrough of 1 Finsbury Avenue, winner of the 2021 AIA Design Excellence Award for Sustainability.  This in-person experience complemented the virtual tour of the same building held in August 2020, when the project had won the 2020 AIA Design Excellence Award for a Professional Large Project.  

Tom Wells, Associate Architect at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM), the RIBA Stirling Prize winning architecture practice, led an engaging tour of the refurbishment and restoration project completed in 2019. The tour began in the public atrium space at ground level with a digital display depicting the project’s historical background and the variety of strategic design decisions that contributed to its award-winning status.

The original office block was designed by Arup Associates’ (Peter Foggo,1984) and is one of 14 post-war office buildings to achieve Grade II listed status (2015) from Historic England.  As one of the first buildings in the Broadgate development, Tom Wells credited it with defining the then prototypical London speculative office building.

The original developer of 1 Finsbury Avenue was Greycoat, headed by Stuart Lipton. Lipton was introduced to Peter Foggo, a partner at Arup Associates, and their relationship helped the project to take shape. After a visit to the United States, Lipton was convinced that the future of workplace design lay in deep office floors brought to completion via fast-track construction. Finsbury Avenue floor plates are 60ft/18m deep, arranged around a central atrium. Lipton achieved his end goal using a steel frame rather than the concrete frame standard in Britain at the time.

The tour highlighted how AHMM’s signature retrofit celebrates Foggo’s original structure while adapting it to become a high-tech, high-finance icon to attract a younger, less corporate occupier. The refurbishment and restoration project highlighted a sophisticated transformation of the former UBS “corporate” office environment into shared spaces and office services for tenants ranging from start-ups to tech leaders such as mimecast.

Image by Timothy Soar

After visiting 1 Finsbury Avenue, both virtually and physically, I believe that the overall attitude and ethos of the building, with its exciting mix of flexible workspaces, cinema, retail and restaurants, makes it a leading example of the future of the workplace.  A key success factor of the project is that British Land’s Broadgate development re-established the public route through the project.  This gesture activates the ground floor and connects the building with Finsbury Avenue Square and the broader Broadgate campus.  It demonstrates how buildings can, and should, contribute to the vibrancy of the urban grain of a city.

Designed in collaboration with artist Morag Myerscough, ‘Atoll’ – the new 7.5m tall, mosaic-tiled installation located in the centre of the lower atrium – also contributes to the project’s overall character and  exemplifies how this architecturally important and flexible office building has been reimagined.  The project will raise the aesthetic and urban standards for a new class of speculative office buildings in the city, being repurposed, open to the public, artfully lit, with exceptional elements that bring life to its internal street. Speculative offices of the future should take note.

Atoll Structure by Morag Myerscough

The AIA UK Chapter will continue to host a combination of live and virtual buildings tours throughout the year, offering architects the opportunity to visit notable buildings that have particular design interests in the UK and abroad. 

Written by Gregory Fonseca, AIA