“I swear to you, I never want to build a flat-faced building again,” says development grandee Sir Stuart Lipton.
“Buildings move on. It must have the right light, it’s got to have what we call Covid-plus – air through the floor, more fresh air – it’s got to be very focused on carbon and it’s got to have great architecture,” he adds.
Lipton Rogers’ latest project – working with US developer Hines on a £1bn scheme for 18 Blackfriars Road, SE1 – will tick these boxes and more. And it will be anything but flat-faced.
Foster + Partners’ designs, submitted in August, include an almost 200m high office tower with an irregular floorplate designed to bring in far more light than conventional, square slabs. Brick-clad rather than all-glass, the 825,000 sq ft tower is stepped to give workers access to green terraces and roof gardens.
Two brick-clad residential blocks will rise to 40 and 45 storeys, providing more than 400 homes – 40% of which will be affordable. All this centres around a new public space, the Rotunda, and alongside it will sit a children’s playground and Hatters Yard, a space for art with places to eat and drink.
For Lipton, it is vital the grown-ups are given the opportunity to play too: “Our day-to-day lives have somehow been abandoned in the world of the office. It has become a workhouse,” he says.
Something different
Looking back at such seminal projects as Broadgate, Chiswick Park, Paternoster Square, EC4, and the more recent 22 Bishopsgate, EC2, Lipton says: “What I’m trying to do is to give you a pattern of a new world. These are all places with either public space or a variety of activities on offer. And, let’s be honest, the boys look at the girls, and the girls look at the boys, and the boys look at the boys, and the girls look at the girls. Twenty per cent of relationships come from the office.”
We are social animals, in other words. And ever since Broadgate introduced after-work relaxation to the City in the 1980s, Lipton has sought to go further in meeting our needs as such. From more natural light and green spaces to good food, culture, places to socialise – and perhaps even meet a future partner.
Lipton, 80, is reluctant to discuss how the new office tower at 18 Blackfriars will raise the bar again. But speaking in the most general terms, he promises: “The next building will be different. When you walk in, it will have coffee, it will have a bar, it will possibly have a newsstand, a flower stand, a lounge area to talk. Ideally, it would have some kind of display area, a little auditorium.” There will be a big emphasis on amenities in the residential buildings, too.
From residents to office workers, Lipton is frustrated the sector hasn’t moved at greater pace to meet people’s needs, to make people feel cared for.
“In property, we are meant to be a service industry, but we walk through these dull streets with dull buildings, which often have poor light. Every entrance hall known to man has got stone on the floor and walls,” he says. At 22 Bishopsgate, Lipton’s alternative office lobby is wrapped in leather, swathed in wood and decked with permanent and changing art. Even the lifts have art.
His career-long obsession with creating offices that people want to come to, where they can be sociable, happy and engaged, has never felt more relevant than in today’s post-pandemic shake-up of how we live and work, how we enjoy ourselves and how we are motivated.
For him, the property sector and its customers have walked blindly into the battle with home working. And yet, working from home, if you are playing it straight, means you work more hours, more intensely with less relief, less amenity. You can’t simply tell people not to do it, Lipton says, but you can make the office more enticing.
“When I was a kid, I had a 6ft desk, 6ft away from my nearest colleague. Now it’s a 4ft desk next to your colleague. The whole world wants to eat free-range. And yet, when it comes to people, we’ve been beastly to each other by factory farming ourselves,” he says. And in design terms, the past 30 years have produced “a mono-style environment”.
He contrasts this with TV – lockdowns opened his eyes to the plethora of lifestyle shows covering everything from cake baking to his personal favourite of BBC One’s The Repair Shop. “I have a pal at the BBC and I asked him, ‘why are you doing this?’ And he said, ‘Very simple – it’s what people enjoy’,” Lipton says. Office developers should think in the same way.
Appetite for change
Working with experts such as Despina Katsikakis, Leesman and Philip Ross, Lipton has long been looking for answers to “what’s in it” for people to come to the office. From those skilfully designed public spaces at Broadgate, to the “enjoy work” philosophy of Chiswick Park more than a decade later and the “vertical village” of amenities at 22 Bishopsgate another decade on, he has always sought to deliver the next answers as to how offices can make coming to work fun and productive.
“We need to rethink how we design our buildings so that we focus on the needs of people,” he says. In a large office building, that could mean walking in and being able to grab a coffee, discovering that there will be a talk on at lunchtime about what’s happening in Russia and then heading to a meeting area for an appointment. Hotel-like service means escaping the lobby and making a beeline for the lifts stops being your priority – but getting there will be easier thanks to facial recognition and boarding passes.
A building can go much further, offering regular events such as salsa evenings, DJ nights and facilitating sports competitions between tenants, teams or departments. Crucially, workers should be able to choose and influence what goes on in the building.
Staff should be motivated, characters valued. The food offer should be high-quality, varied, affordable. When Lipton visits a building, his first question to the person who meets him at reception is “What’s the food like here?”. Often the answer is “Good but I can’t afford it, so I bring my own”. That shouldn’t be the case, Lipton argues, suggesting that low-income workers should be able to enjoy subsidised food.
“Factory or free-range?”
But who pays for all of this? It’s down to the employer to decide whether they want “factory farming” or “free range” and what variety of environments they want, Lipton says. What the building can do is enable the employer to consolidate by providing the amenities it wants.
“The tenant will need less space. You don’t need to have your own restaurant or your own gym because the building provides these things. You’re saving space, so it’s important that tenants contribute to this,” Lipton says. “It should be a combo of the landlord and the tenant. So the landlord will put the amenities in at reduced cost and the tenant will be paying because he should be getting what he wants.”
He recalls the early days of Broadgate, when 2,000 people would fill the square for the events put on each day. “As soon as it opened, we would have lots of complaints from the CEOs of the major tenants. Their people were all out in that space, enjoying themselves,” he says. That’s how it should be. “Life is so focused and demanding, you need contrast, you need to be able to walk outside,” he adds.
Lipton is passionate about public space. He accepts that developers can’t always deliver it within the constraints of a site. But in the context of the City, he believes the City Corporation can do more on this – through the healthy streets initiative to enable walking, cycling and social interaction, for example, and the work being done to join up streets, because people don’t want “insular buildings”.
“They own 32% of the land in the City,” Lipton points out. “So they could ask developers to put the money in to buy a piece of property for a pocket park. We learnt from the pandemic that people love parks. So imagine if you could go to your little local park in the City of London and have a coffee for a pound because you are a member of that park.”
He has a deep interest in how we can make buildings and places active – and believes the planning system overlooks the importance of this. “Nobody gives a building, in design terms and consents, marks for being socially successful,” he says. “And shouldn’t it be? If you’re in a borough, don’t you want the people to be happy? Don’t you want them to shop more? Don’t you want them to use the amenities more? Don’t you want them to look after the community more? This is a radical change in our attitudes.”
And developers should be playing a key role in delivering on it. Lipton comes back to those TV shows on everything from sewing and singing to dancing and pottery. “They are just a reflection of us as individuals,” he says. “So why can’t we in the property world reflect what our customers’ most important commodity is: people. Without people, an organisation is useless. So we must design the building to be interesting. Obviously terraces and planting, but the building’s got to have character too. It’s got to make you feel ‘this is interesting’. It might be a ‘Marmite building’, but that would be good in my book.”
No slabs
Development is far from dead, Lipton says – just look at the growth of rental values for new office buildings in the City and West End. But the many millions of sq ft becoming obsolete create challenge and opportunity. “When these buildings are refurbished, they’ve got to be lively. We’ve got to look to architects who are going to produce interesting work. We don’t want slabs,” he says.
Lipton has been lucky enough to work with many of the greats – including Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster and the late Richard Rogers.
“I think you’ll find that great architects are also very sensitive to people,” he says. He pauses for a moment. “What I’m saying is this: there is almost a revolution happening in how we look after people.”
Long live the revolution.
To send feedback, e-mail julia.cahill@eg.co.uk or tweet @EGJuliaC or @EGPropertyNews
