|
|
Article: The city in the wilderness. (headquarters of British Airways in Harmondsworth, England)
- Article from:
- The Architectural Review
- Article date:
- August 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 EMAP Architecture. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Niels Torp's new corporate headquarters for British Airways has clear parallels with his earlier seminal building for SAS. Both generate an intricate spatial matrix for the variety and activity of working life.
Harmondsworth has from time immemorial been a godforsaken place. Traditionally a barren moor to the west of London stalked by highwaymen and splattered with a few dingy hamlets, it was colonized in the nineteenth century by sporadic and dowdy suburbs. In the second half of the twentieth, two motorways sliced through it, leaving between a barren swath largely used as a rubbish dump. The name (though not the place) was only known to the wider world as the ...