Allies and Morrison’s 100 Bishopsgate: ‘The first of its kind… and maybe the last’
Graham Morrison hails the tower as ‘the first of a new generation of offices’, offering Canary Wharf-scale space in the City of London. But have the crash, Covid, Brexit and the climate crisis changed the game?
26 April 2021
By Rob Wilson. Photography by Jason Hawkes and Nick Guttridge
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‘It goes from Medieval to Miesian,’ says Allies and Morrison’s Graham Morrison, as we contemplate 100 Bishopsgate’s faceted glassy form rising above us. The building morphs from a parallelogram-shaped footprint at ground level – generated by the angles of the original Medieval street pattern – rising to glassy four-square office floorplates nearer its top, 40 storeys above. To take a tailoring analogy, these angled facets in its envelope twist its form from spreading skirt to tightly fitted torso. ‘The shaping is intended to make it less overbearing,’ says Morrison. Certainly, unlike PLP’s 22 Bishopsgate behemoth currently completing down the street, it doesn’t loom quite so large, for all that it’s a 1 million square foot, 181m-high building.