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PROJECT REPORT: COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS
TRANSFORMED
Although a refurbishment, the project has tackled the workspace’s various shortcomings such that users would experience it as a new building
terms was on the facade, where a saving of between £5 and £8m represented a 30% reduction in cost.
In touch with history
Almost all the shortcomings of the original building have been eliminated, so that casual observers would see an entirely new building, and one built to the most demanding of contemporary standards. But Canary Wharf, despite its relevant youth as a development ‘cluster,’ has its own history – and the designers have paid tribute to that built legacy.
The eye-catching ticker tape screen around the outside of the original building is now referenced from within reception in the form of a high-level array of LED lights in a strip around the area. These can convey words or images, as required. Woods says this ‘digital art wall’ can show a pattern of water, of trees or of clouds. In contrast to the previous more mundane communication
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK
of stock market prices, it enhances the building’s connection with nature. There’s another piece of development context to the project which is a fortuitous alignment with its nature focus. Canary Wharf Partnership has renamed the Middle Dock as Eden Dock, in reference to the Eden Project, transforming it to create a place for nature and biodiversity within an intensely developed business area. There is a well-established concept of ‘borrowed landscape’ – buildings which benefi t from their surroundings. In the case of the YY Building this is purely serendipitous – but given all the deliberate steps that have been taken to improve the quality of the original the serendipity seems well-deserved. What could benefi t more from an improved setting, than a building that has conserved its frame, extended and turned itself into a pleasant, welcoming, healthy and environmentally responsible place in which to work?
ADF JUNE 2025
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