Engineering Matters is a production of Reby Media. This episode was written and hosted by Alex Conacher and assisted by his co-host was Bernadette Ballantyne.

Start of Transcript

Opener:

Alex
Possibly the most famous prophet in history is Nostradamus.  The French astrologer lived in the 16th century and wrote lengthy poetry, supposedly predicting things to come. 

Bernadette
Every year his cryptic verses are seized upon by journalists looking to fill column inches and mystics fearing the End Times. 

Alex
If Nostradamus penned something that hits reasonably close to major events, his esteem grows. If he misses, well… what does he care?

Bernadette
But there are businesses out there that actually have to predict the future. They have to guess how individuals and society will behave 5, 10 years into the future.

Alex
They can look at behavioural trends, industry preferences but, ultimately, a lot can happen in 10 years.

Bernadette
And the people making these predictions are in charge of hundreds of millions of pounds. Their decisions carve out the built environment and sculpt the skylines of cities.

Alex
If they get the decisions they make right, they can make money, yes… but more than that, they can spark new relationships, shape companies, and affect the work of tens of thousands.

Bernadette
If you want to meet someone who truly has to predict the future, find someone who is asked to build a skyscraper.

Hello and Welcome

Alex and Bernadette
Hello and welcome to Engineering Matters, I’m Alex Conacher and I’m Bernadette Ballantyne. In this episode we have partnered with WSP in the UK to talk about one of the latest additions to the London skyline.  

Bernadette
The building is 22 Bishopsgate. It takes its place among the Gherkin, the Cheese-grater and the Walkie-Talkie… but, although at 278m it is the tallest building in the City of London 

Alex
…and the second tallest in Western Europe after the Shard, south of the River Thames…

Bernadette
…it doesn’t have an eccentric nickname (at least not yet). And there is a good reason for that. Whereas these other weird buildings are visually bizarre… Twenty-Two just isn’t.

Alex
Although Twenty-Two looks good from the outside. The reason it is interesting isn’t how it appears from a distance.

Bernadette
The reason Twenty-Two is sparking conversation is what it is going on, on the inside. What it is like to work, and to spend time in the building. And how its developers wholly predicted what people would need from a post-Covid office, up to 10 years before the pandemic.

Alex
Which is how long it takes to build a skyscraper and, once it is with us, it is with us almost forever…all of that, plus it’s unconventional birth from the unfinished remains of a skyscraper that made its own prediction for the future…a prediction that it lost when the great recession hit

Background

Bernadette
The people who have to predict the future of the built environment come from diverse backgrounds and bring a range of skills. To make 22 Bishopsgate happen required a team of thousands. 

Alex
We can’t bring them all into a single podcast, but this episode will be built on foundations provided by a developer, a structural engineer, an architect, and a mechanical and electrical engineer.

Bernadette
First, we need to get a handle on the background of 22 Bishopsgate and for that we need to meet our developer. And for him, an interest in how things worked started in childhood…

Paul 
…I was the person who would, whenever I was given something, I'd probably take it apart, put it back together again, and I always wanted to see how something worked. So, when I went to technical college, I went and studied building which was quite, you know, reasonably practical, or you could certainly see that what you were learning and how, what you were learning was put into practice.

Alex
This is Paul Hargreaves. He is the Construction Director for Lipton Rogers.

Paul 
When I finished my building course, it was the height of the recession back in the 80s. And so I went off to Bristol University, and studied construction management, which was, you know, three years there. And then we hit another recession as well, believe it or not. So that wasn’t great.

Bernadette
Paul clawed his way into industry despite the recessions, but these rapid economic shifts left him with an appreciation for how quickly things can change.

Alex
He worked on a number of projects, at Imperial College, the Royal Opera House, the first Apple Store in Europe, and the Nokia HQ during the mobile company’s heyday but never a tall building. And when 22 Bishopsgate came along, he thought:

Paul 
Well, it's a nice opportunity. You know, it’s that right time in my career that I thought, well, let's have a go. I've never built… the tallest building I built was about…

…17 or 18 storeys, so why not go for a 62-storey building?

Bernadette
Back in 2012, Paul and Lipton Rogers had become aware of a stalled project in the City of London called Pinnacle.

Paul 
The previous Pinnacle project had a consortium of about 80 funders, who were all putting money in to fund the development and the project was haemorrhaging money. 

They needed to go back and ask the consortium for more money and when you're having to ask 80 people for money, you don't need many to say “sorry, no enough is enough” for the project to fall over. So it fell over and it wasn't going anywhere. So it laid a dormant site for you know…

Three or four years… 

Alex
The problem was that Pinnacle had been conceived in a different time, before the Global Financial Crisis. Design was completed in 2005 and foundation construction began in 2006 but the cruel calculus of the post-recession era made the building unviable.

Paul 
Pinnacle was certainly, you know, a beautiful building, but a building of its time…

Bernadette
(Remember the slew of London skyscrapers named after recognisable objects)

Paul
…Buildings were getting names and they were all very nice buildings, all lovely buildings, very sculptural.

But, you know, they were buildings of their time and the Pinnacle was a lovely building. But the problem with the Pinnacle is that it was very much an art form. And to give you an idea, every single pane of glass in the Pinnacle was a different size and what comes with that is huge cost. And you know, there is no repetition at all. It also had quite a strange core, which meant there were transfers. So you literally had to go up a lift, transfer to another lift to get to the top of the building and it meant the floor plates were very irregular. 

Alex
And not really what people wanted from a practicality point of view, But, again, undeniably a work of art.

Paul 
So when we started looking at it, we thought, “well, we've got to find a much more economic way to make this building work”.

Bernadette
Conventional wisdom might have told Paul and Lipton Rogers to overreact to the changes of the financial crisis, to design a building for pure economy, maximum floorspace, total financial efficiency.

Alex
But they didn’t. They took a moment and called in more expertise. They contacted Despina Katsikakis, who works for the commercial real estate agent Cushman Wakefield.

Paul 
…and we asked her, “where do you think of the best buildings in the world at the moment? Who's out there about the future of buildings and offices and space and - what people want?” And she said: “you've got to come over to Australia and have a look at what they're doing Sydney and Melbourne.”

Bernadette
The big banks and other companies were looking after their staff, putting people first. So there was a big research trip out to Australia to look at what was going on.

Paul 
They were building towers, but they were putting in lots of amenities. And this is where we got our vision for creating Twenty-Two and making it a vertical village. And, you know, if you were to go to 22 Bishopsgate, potentially it could have 12,000 people in the building. Sort of unlikely, but more, like sort of, generally, 8000 people during a normal day in the building. Well, 8000 people is, you know, it's a small village, well… small town, not a village and in a village or town, you would have your town hall, you might have your village green but you'll have your local shop, you'll have a restaurant, you'll have, you know, food outlets, your coffee shop.  You'll have lots of amenities to serve the community and that's where we got the idea of designing a building that had lots of amenities to serve the occupants of the building. So, the way that the building ended up being designed, lent itself to some spare spaces within the building that we felt that we could use and return to the occupants of the building.

Alex
So not a knee-jerk, maximise rentable area, but make 22 Bishopsgate a comfortable place to be with extra facilities that could be rented to companies or used by employees at will.

Bernadette
A departure from prioritising aesthetics… but completely swerving away from a grim utilitarianism.

Paul 
We're sort of affordable workspace. And then, within there, we've put in spaces to be able to give presentations and lectures. So some bleacher seating, maker-spaces. 

You can have, you know, the best, immersive, VC conferencing room or editing suites… stuff that tenants may want to use periodically, but might not want to spend… or put, you know, the outlay of creating a really great space in their offices where they only use it once a year. 

Bernadette
As well as this, on various floors they also built restaurants, viewing galleries, gyms, wellness centres… filling the structure with amenities, like they learned in Australia.

Alex
The winds of change blew and the global pandemic emerged in early 2020. All of a sudden the destination office became the zeitgeist of what an office should be. Amenities, a desirable meeting location, and rentable facilities became critical to businesses.

But back in the early mid-2010s, to do all of this, required increasing the available area of the building by 30% compared to that which would have been offered by Pinnacle

Bernadette
It required immediate buy-in from the new consortium, ahead of planning permission being granted by the city.

Alex
And on top of all this, the foundations for Pinnacle had already been built. Grinding and digging them out would be an incredible waste in a world growing evermore carbon conscious.

Bernadette
The next character in this story needs to be a structural engineer…

Diego 
So, I was born in Peru and I grew up in different construction sites, because my father is a civil engineer. So my childhood was basically us travelling across the country, working on roads and bridges and power stations and canals. So it was not really an option. It was quite an easy choice.  

Alex
This is Diego Padilla-Philipps, Technical Director for WSP in the UK, and our structural engineer.

Diego 
And when the time came to choose a career, I had two options, the two things that I liked the most were engineering and art. 

I chose engineering, but I always felt connected to art. And I found that structural engineering is, in my opinion, a very creative, very artistic side of civil engineering.

Bernadette
Then in 2007 a major earthquake struck Peru’s capital, Lima.

Diego 
And I was there in Lima. And I experienced that ground movement and it motivated me to study something related to seismic engineering. So I found the Masters in in the UK at UCL and I came to do a Master's in seismic engineering and disaster management and the rest is history.

Alex
The UK is not known for its seismicity, but… 

Diego 
My background is in seismic engineering has given me a really good understanding of dynamics and as all buildings move, it depends what makes them move. In the UK, for example, it is the wind.  The wind pushes them and makes them sway. In a seismic region, it is the ground that shakes, resulting in movement and forces. So, in the end, building dynamics are universal. So it has given me that really good understanding of dynamics.

Bernadette
Diego joined WSP in May 2014 and, on the 21st of December - just before Christmas, he was presented the problem of how to balance the loads of a bigger building on an already-built foundation… 

Diego 
And when we saw the magnitude of the column forces, we realised this is something big. The challenge was how do we locate the new column forces into these existing capacity and find some transfer strategies? 

When we read the column forces, we thought this is something big. And it was actually a Christmas present... and then it changed the rest of my career forever.

Alex
Because Diego spent the next five years working on the most challenging foundations of his career.

Diego 
So we started with an existing three storey basement, all buried underground, but also a partial core.  The old Pinnacle core was built up to level nine, 

Diego 
That's what we inherited.  The call was to be demolished, which was a small part of the existing structure and then the entire basement was to be retained as much as possible. When you have existing structures, you try to reuse that capacity. That way you save on materials and time, but also what is currently the most important factor: carbon emissions.

Bernadette
The less you build, the less carbon emissions you generate.

Diego 
So, we have three stories of basement. They were designed for another tower, they had capacity and the columns of the Pinnacle.  So, the columns were in different positions to those of the new building to be proposed and the brief was to retain as much as we could; keep as much as we could.  So, not only from an engineering point of view, but also from an architectural point of view how does the design team reuse the existing basement geometry to adapt to the new needs of a bigger and different building?

Alex
The Pinnacle building had a unique spiral shape and had a perimeter diagrid –  a framework of diagonally intersecting metal, concrete, or wooden beams that is used in the construction of buildings and roofs.

Diego 
So, the perimeter columns had a special spacing but also had very large capacity, because they were supporting the stability forces of the tower.  So when you look at a plan, you had some capacity in the sense that it's more concrete core, and then columns around the perimeter in an elliptical sort of shape, which was there because of the shape the Pinnacle. Ideally, we would need to locate the new columns where the existing ones were so we could utilise all of our capacity. Now, the floor plate of 22 Bishopsgate, trying to optimise the use of the site was different, was bigger, was larger. So, we had to coordinate with the architect where to place the new columns so that they were as close as possible to the existing Pinnacle columns in the basement. 

Bernadette
And, in some cases, this was possible. In some cases, this was a real challenge. So they had to create a transition level over several storeys.

Diego 
And the smoother that transition, the better it is, in terms of load transfer. So we used between levels three, and eight, to transition from the basement positions to the superstructure positions gradually, in a way of inclining the columns in or out to meet them. And the reason why this was from level three and up is because, I believe, the intention for the ground floor, ground three was to have fully vertical columns. So that they looked as impressive as they look right now.  We finished, like, a nice row of massive columns along the pavement, straight vertical columns, and then transitioned gradually into the final positions.

Alex
In structural engineering, inclined columns are the most efficient way to transfer a force from one point to another but when you incline a column, you generate a horizontal force.

Diego 
So, I normally explain this with a pen or a pencil and I “say if you push this pencil vertically, where your two hands are, the forces are all vertical, brilliant. Now, put that on a table and then push it down.  It’s all vertical. Now, incline the pencil a little bit and if you push it down, what happens? It tries to slide you see? So, somewhere, it has to be restrained at the bottom and at the top to stop it from sliding. And the same happens in a building.  If I have an inclined column, the forces are coming down, we're generating mega horizontal forces somewhere. Now, the more inclined, the bigger the forces, the less inclined, the smaller forces. So, if we incline between level three and level eight, that's five levels that the forces are “do-able”. And those horizontal forces have to travel through the existing floor plate into the elements, which resist the horizontal forces in the building, which, in this case, is the concrete core, where all the lifts are; all the services are.

Bernadette
The core of any tall building is a really strong structure, providing lateral stability to the building, capable of holding those strong horizontal forces together. They travel into the core and down through the floor.

Diego 
In some cases, if the forces are too big, it goes through additional steel elements embedded within the slab, back into the core so that you're holding that in place. And the same happens in the basement.  Whenever we have inclined columns, we are resisting these horizontal forces within the basement box with all the other elements. In some cases, we also needed bigger transfer structures, in some cases, it was impossible to just have inclined columns. So we have actually a big a deep beam, or a deep truss. And these mega transfers, what they do is, they bring the forces from one position to where the capacity really is. And, in some cases, these are hidden within the within the architecture.

Alex
In the basement, they have a hidden beam that is nearly 4m deep.

Diego 
So, it is basically a wall and it's hidden within a floor within a plant room so that it is not seen. But there is a mega structural element there, transferring that. And one of the reasons why we couldn't have an incline column or a column going through is because below that space, we had a turning table for the waste management lorries to go into the basement and rotate. And that was the only place where it could go to make sure that, in this case, for me, that was fascinating to understand because it was the waste management strategy that was driving the structure.

Bernadette
The relatively small footprint of a skyscraper and all of the disciplines that need to work together means that each team needs to work around the needs of their colleagues. It is a delicate ballet… and our next dancer is an expert in M&E fit-out.

David 
There was definitely engineering in the family. And my uncle, my father was a civil engineer and then worked in construction as a as a contractor and then, later, lecturing and construction management. So I guess I can't deny that didn't have any influence.

Alex
This is David Healy, Mechanical and Electrical Engineer, one of Diego’s colleague’s at WSP in the UK.

David 
And I think what I liked about engineering, at that stage in my life was that, you know, there are so many options open to you, because you can kind of do almost anything with an engineering degree. And, you know, I think someone makes a point that, you know, a lot of the CEOs of companies started off as engineers, I think it's a good kind of training.

Bernadette
David is responsible for… well, the lungs and life of the building. Which is more effort than normal, given all of the amenities and features that the developers wanted.

David 
We call ourselves building services or MEP engineers, “M” being mechanical, and “E” being electrical and “P” being plumbing or public health. So, I'll sort of take it in order. 

On the mechanical side, we look to maintain comfortable conditions in the building. So that's ventilating the spaces with fresh air, making sure that they're heated and cooled, And what that means from a plant perspective is, generally, 

David 
on a building like this we'll have large chillers, generally in the basement, those will pump the chilled water around to all the occupied floors so they can get their cooling from that system. And then we also need to get rid of all the heat that they put back into the system. And generally that's done by cooling towers at the top of the building. So you can imagine that at some point, we're taking the whole load for the building and connecting the chillers in the basement and the cooling towers on the roof. So you can, you know, you get pipework, you can just about hug it. We've got a large heating system though, at the time we designed 22 Bishopsgate, it was gas fired boilers. 

Alex
This is possibly the only change David says would probably be made if they were designing the building now. An electric heating system in 2022 looks more future-proof, because the electricity grid is decarbonising as part of the UK’s route to Net Zero Carbon

Bernadette
But this is the nature of designing a building for a world that does not yet exist.

David 
Gas fired boilers distributes the heating throughout the building. And then the ventilation on this building is done by what we call air handling units. And if you can imagine some double decker buses parked partway up your building, that gives you an idea of the scale of these units. You know, because we're moving enough air around for 12,000 people. So there's some pretty big demands on the space. 

Alex
So those are the key mechanical systems. 

David 
Electrically, there are large transformers in the bottom of the building, and they take the high voltage that we get from the utility in the street, and they drop it down to 400 volts through a whole other series of transformers. And, because  tenants in a building like this are always really interested in the resilience, they want to be able to keep their operations going, even if there's a fault somewhere in the system. We've got a lot of duplication on the electrical infrastructure to keep that going. 

Alex
Another key part of the electrical infrastructure is having standby generators at the top of the building to keep everything going in the case of an outage.

David 
And the other thing you get from the generator system is we've got a lot of life safety systems. So, in a tall building, we'll have things like sprinklers.  We'll be doing smoke extract from the basement will be pressurising the stairs with air so that if there is a fire anywhere, it keeps them clear of smoke. And then there's fire detection and alarm systems and all the rest of it. So yeah, a not only do we need to consider how things work on a day to day basis, but we need to work out what happens if there's a fire and then that's probably one of the most interesting parts of the of the whole design and subject to a lot of scrutiny. But actually it kind of sits there in the background and hopefully, you know, people never know it's there.

Bernadette
The building also uses lifts for emergency egress in the event of a fire. This is because stairs in tall buildings are a serious obstacle for the mobility impaired or the elderly.

Alex
How 22 Bishopsgate achieved this is fascinating and the subject of one of the first ever episodes of Engineering Matters. See the episode we released on 21 August 2018 titled “In the event of fire, use the lift”. We’ve linked it in our show notes.

Bernadette
Last but not least is plumbing, getting fresh water around the building for occupants, for the restrooms, and for other uses around the building.

David 
But then also providing drainage and, you know, trying to recycle water where appropriate and dealing with rainwater from the top of the building, and getting all the way down. And as you can imagine, in a tall building, one of the key challenges is trying to keep the core of the building, where all the lifts and the stairs and the services are distributed as tightly as possible. So we're always looking at ways of optimising all those different systems to minimise the impact.

Alex
From an M&E point of view, but also a challenge for Diego’s structural design, is that there is a lot more competition for basement space in a modern skyscraper.

David 
We have a building that was, sort of, 50% bigger so, you know, we started off by talking about all the plants that we're going to need and some of that would ideally have been in the basement but, when you put a bigger building on the same basement and that plant or gets a bit bigger so on its own, you know, that makes the basement a lot more constrained.

Bernadette
A larger building required larger areas for deliveries.  Cycling is more popular so cycle storage and the showers that go with that also increase compared with the previous design… so a lot of the plant that would normally go in the basement gets kicked upwards to plant floors that are spaced higher up the building which, in turn, competes with restaurants and other spaces…

David 
We get a bit of competition with the amenities.  We try and move stuff a bit more up and we kind of kept on going until we reached the top of the building.

Alex
And, at the top of the building, the designers needed to start worrying about not encroaching into the flightpath to London City Airport. So it was a competitive environment that required careful coordination between all of the sections.

Bernadette
And the artistry of how it all hangs together depends on the architect. 

Amy 
Well, I'm American. So, you know, not from the shores but my parents were military and moved every three to four years that was, you know, different places, different things. That's probably what brings me to London we always change places and change things. And I find that interesting and exciting, even though I've actually lived here longer than I've lived anywhere. But I knew I liked creative things. 

My dad was an engineer, you know, it was like… “what can I do that is creative, but also, it's not just fluffy stuff” and so that's where I started thinking towards architecture. aeons and aeons ago.

Alex
This is Amy Holtz from PLP Architecture. She has noticed a number of the features of Twenty Two appearing in buildings more recently.

Amy 
I think the provision of shared amenities and things that make a building beyond just an office building is for sure.  You see projects picking up on these things.

At the time when they started developing the site 10 odd years ago. 

You needed to maximise area of post-recession. But they saw this, this spot in the market that, if you focus on the people and the retention of staff, which the big businesses want to do, then you have great spaces to bring them into, and these amenities and the quality of space Twenty Two provides helps them do that, because it's not that we, you know, a 62 storey building, we didn’t pinch every inch

In order to get more floors in there we have three metres clear throughout the office plate, with the ceiling stepping up to 3.2 at the facades, and that brings in a huge amount more daylight into the space and just gives the perception of taller more generous spaces for the entire office space.

Bernadette
The façade of 22 Bishopsgate is another feature that was ahead of its time.

Alex
Amy came to London in 2004 and immediately took up a Masters in Environmental design, an area she has worked in ever since, and is now Head of Sustainability at PLP. In all that time there has been a growing awareness of environmental issues, but when Twenty Two was being designed, industry’s laser focus on Net Zero had not yet arrived.

Amy 
Externally, we wanted the ability, for the building to behave almost like a chameleon on the skyline. The facade, if you're looking at it through the day, changes in response to the light levels, or the viewing angle and the surrounding environment. So, often, you can see it go from transparent to milky white, to reflecting all of the clouds. 

Bernadette
And it's not that those are all different facade types. 

Amy 
It's that we carefully crafted the angle and the clarity of the glass so that it did become that chameleon. 

Alex
The façade system is what is known as a closed cavity façade, which has three panes of glass. Two are double-glazed, then there is a cavity, then a third pane. The cavity is pressurised and contains an automated blind. 

Bernadette
As the sun’s energy hits the building, initially some radiation is reflected from the outer face of the external glazing. 

Alex
A reduced amount penetrates into the cavity, where it is reflected back out by the blinds or absorbed heating the air in the cavity. That then re-radiates the heat back out. 

The inner double glazing with low E coating insulates the hot cavity from the office inside and further reflects the energy back to the outside.  Finally, a small amount of the solar energy will make its way into the building.  This is around 10% when the blinds are fully closed.

Bernadette
This all gives the building great insulation in winter but, in summer, the blinds are really clever. They use a geometrical model of the surrounding buildings and sensors to detect the position and intensity of the sun.

Alex
It then makes an intelligent decision as to when it should deploy the blinds. So, if there are clouds already blocking the sun from the façade, it knows that it doesn’t need to block the heat.

Bernadette
Without all of this it is necessary to design a darker façade, resulting in a gloomier office environment.

Amy 
That's not just for fun, because we thought it would ‘look nice’, it's also performing something and it's also helping to make the building better for the people within it, as well as something special when you're seeing it from afar. 

It's a slightly reflective glass that we've wrapped around the facade and, in a way, it further accentuates the varied and dynamic appearance of the facade. 

Alex
The first thing people see in a large building is often a grand entrance hall but, for Twenty Two, the team was keen to have something on a more human scale.

Amy 
It's the civic face of the building.  We go in it, it's a crafted and man-made juxtaposition to the glass and steel tower above. So you get above level three, at the level three market we have a cornice line created by this concrete and glass canopy that has intermittent artwork by Alexander Beleschenko along that run…

But we worked quite carefully to make sure that the base felt human; that it didn't feel like this tower that it brought you, because you see the tower from a distance and it's a special thing and the glass is working incredibly hard and the facets are working and everything is creating this whole element. But, as you walk up a pedestrian scale, it is a different experience. You don't see that tower as you're walking down Threadneedle and you get closer, and you approach it. You see, the lobby, you see this, it's really civic space. And it's designed to be open to the public to walk through.. () In a way it serves as a changing art gallery.

Bernadette
They haven’t just plastered the entire building in stone because “that’s what you do”. They didn’t want to have a traditional entrance hall.

Amy 
And, if you walked on Bishopsgate you feel that you see people walking along and stopping and looking and they look up at the canopy, and they look in at the artwork. And I think they want to go in. I mean, I know I want to go in!

Wrap-Up

Alex
The success of a major building development such as Twenty-Two rests on whether it has accurately assessed and predicted the future needs of its tenants. So what does our developer think of how well Twenty Two does in a post-pandemic world  considering the project planning began years before?

Paul 
Yeah, I think we were very fortunate. I think we did all this research and we, we like to push things a bit as well. And we realised very early on that, you know, when you're building a building, like Twenty Two, a huge building… the build programme is, I don't know, roughly four or five years. So, you're designing a building that has to be at the forefront of the market. Effectively your design is five years old, so you've got a real challenge. So, you're building a big building, but you've got to be competing against that smaller building, that's maybe, you know, a fifth of the size, but their design is only probably three years old, but yours is five.  So, you've got to be where they are as well, because that's going to be your competition. So what do you do? You have to be quite brave, but you've got to do your research. So we did lots of lots of research and where, I think, we were lucky is that we decided to push technology hard.

Bernadette
They gauged the trajectory of the technology of the time and financial technology companies had become a major force in the city.

Paul 
And we needed to create a building that they would want to be in. So, one big thing that we did, and we're very brave, I suppose doing it, is we put in facial recognition throughout as an entry to the building. You know, we wanted to make getting into a building as easy as possible. I mean, it's very easy to see that, you know, when you walk into an office, you might have gone to grab a coffee before you go in there. So you've got a bag in your hand. You've got a cup of coffee in your hand and you might have your mobile phone wedged under your ear or your ear pods in whatever, or been on the phone. And then to walk up to a barrier and have to fumble around for a pass. That pass, that could have been handed to anybody might not be your pass, and walk through some barriers and get in was always going to be a bit of a challenge. So, let's make it easy. So we thought, well, facial recognition.

Alex
Entry to a building without physical contact with any surfaces, or interaction with another person… it turned out to be exactly what people needed during the pandemic.

Paul
And most people, I'd say, you know, the vast majority, are happy to sign up to it.   Everyone's so used to it, it's on everybody's phone, now.  You just use the technology everywhere, you know, you do it for your banking, you do it for you looking at phone. So to walk into a building and not have to worry about it… and you just walk through the barrier is brilliant. So that was great. 

Alex
Add to this, all of the amenities, clever structural engineering and foundation re-use, the smart façade, and innovative M&E and you have a building that truly predicted the future. 

Bernadette
So here is another prediction… As we, as a society, become more concerned with embodied carbon buildings of the future will have to reuse existing structures to an even greater extent

Alex
With no more undeveloped land in London and the centres of other major cities, it is a prediction you can rely on. Far more than Nostradamus.

End of Transcript