Field Trip to London Part 2

3 Feb: After Broadgate we walked on north westwards, to City Rd, and then to SOM's office in London. Timo Kujala entertained us with an introduction to the site, visions of the previous scheme for the site (now stopped), and reasons for changing to a new design (now going ahead). The new design will be more viable economically by doing without the expensive parking groundscraper; it was too high an upfront cost for a mainly residential scheme. The bridge to Canning Town station will also be cheaper.
After Timo's talk, we had to use the Tube to get to the other side of London, to Hammersmith, for a walk down through Fulham to the office of Rogers Stirk Harbour. Dirk Krolikowski has been working for RSH for 3 yrs on the Leadenhall St project, producing wonderful visionary 3D details of the construction - at all scale levels - from the megabraced frame, to the secondary frame, right down to how steel and glass of the facade will work and accommodate movement. He delivers a great lecture with plenty of good advice for young designers. He also allowed us to view the extensive model exhibition, mostly made by their in-house modelmaking team.