Lloyd's Building

Rogers won the competition to replace Lloyd's outgrown 1928 headquarters in 1978, eight years before Bovis handed over the finished building in 1986, the year London's markets were transformed by the 'Big Bang' deregulation. The design repeats the argument he had made with Renzo Piano at the Pompidou a decade earlier, at greater intensity: lifts, stairs, lavatories, and mechanical ducts are all pushed outside the concrete frame in stainless-steel pods and towers, leaving the interior as a single stepped atrium lit from a barrel-vaulted glass roof, so that the underwriting 'Room' at its base can grow or shrink across the surrounding galleries without touching a fixed structural wall. The original 1928 entrance at 12 Leadenhall Street survives, oddly grafted onto the new facade. Weathering the external steelwork proved far costlier to maintain than anyone predicted, but the building was Grade I listed in 2011, the youngest structure in Britain ever to receive the designation. Inside, the salvaged Lutine Bell, rung to announce major shipping losses since the eighteenth century, still hangs at the Room's centre.