This planning-approved office scheme for Hoi Hup Realty creates a new western gateway to the City of London. The brief was to transform the site – once home to the Knights Templar Church in the 12th century – into a best-in-class workplace and cultural hub designed to ambitious sustainability targets.
We conceived a 10-storey solid-masonry building divided into five blocks, applying an architectural language and material palette inspired by the site’s medieval heritage and surrounding conservation areas. A new public venue introduces three floors of exhibition and performance space, while the floors above house flexible office space, with upper levels set back for planted terraces. Ground-floor retail units and affordable workspace front a landscaped pocket park to the south.
The scheme’s all-electric heating/cooling strategy and on-site renewable energy generation raise the local benchmark for sustainable workplace design, while its emphasis on urban greening and public amenity support the City’s repositioning as a world-leading leisure destination.
The scheme involved the replacement of 250,000ft² of outdated offices on a 1.4-acre island site. This was our first scheme under the City of London Corporation’s ‘retrofit-first’ policy, which requires extensive carbon optioneering to justify new-build schemes. This selection of 1:500 massing models forms part of a wider series of models we experimented with in the lead up to planning. We explored options for retaining/retrofitting the existing building, retaining just the floors and cores, and full new-build options.
As part of this process, we used laser-cut acrylic to model floorplates and cores as well as solid timber for visualising the mass of the building. Alongside handmade models, we used 3D printing to produce more than 150 iterations. Between them, the selected models here represent key design moves made between competition submission and planning approval (2019–2025).
