Architecture

Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.

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Lloyd's of London

The building turned inside out: lifts, ducts and lavatories bolted to the outside so the inside can be changed.

TowersContemporary

Photo by Lloyd's of London, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Lloyd's ran a competition in 1978 and gave it to Richard Rogers, who had just finished the Pompidou Centre in Paris and did the same thing again here: everything a building normally hides - the lifts, the staircases, the pipework, the lavatory pods - is hung on the outside, so the floors within can be reorganised without touching the structure. It was finished in 1986, and in 2011, at twenty-five years old, it became the youngest building ever given the highest grade of historic protection in England. The oddest thing in it is on the eleventh floor: a dining room designed by Robert Adam in 1763 for the Earl of Shelburne, taken apart and carried into the middle of a machine, where it still is.

Where
1 Lime Street, EC3M 7HA
Nearest station
Monument · 5 min walk

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