“The White City site is covered by storage and warehouses – a curiously un-urban situation in the heart of the city. It is also almost completely surrounded by impossibilities: there is a motorway on the eastside which really thwarts the communication between the site and its environment, the site is cut in two parts by another motorway in the north, and then to the south there will be a large shopping centre. This is how we finally worked the idea of a grid, modified in order to respond precisely to three conditions, the motorway, the infrastructure to the south and the relatively serene and un-compromised part in the centre. So from the beginning we thought that there would be three zones. The project is almost an anthology of what would happen in those three zones. For us, it was really interesting to try to create a section of London that looked as fragmented as London does and that has the same kind of intricate and eccentric connections.”
“Developers, and the financial institutions that support them, fall into default positions very easily. They do not realize that the office of today is not a stable building type because, especially in cities like London, neither synchrony nor co-location are necessary conditions of work any longer. This does not mean that people are going to work from home all the time but they are going to be much more mobile, using many settings, in many different ways, in many different places. When I look at the masterplan for the White City, I am not convinced by the urbanistic proposition, neither am I sure that the building blocks, the towers, the headquarters, the “doughnuts” will not somehow degenerate, under the pressure from these developers and financial institutions, into conventional ordinary office buildings separated from other uses in the classical way.”
“Now is a particularly difficult time to be forecasting. It is true that, on average, both the size of units that people occupy and the size of companies have been falling. But on the other hand, when we look at Canary Wharf as an existing comparison for the future White City, one of the reasons that so many financial institutions have moved there is the large spaces where they can all be together instead of being scattered. The more we can communicate, apparently, the more we want to be together. We need things that are robust to change, but planning for changes that we are not sure will happen seems to me a recipe for not doing anything.”
“From my limited perspective, the significance of White City is that it is the western marker of an extended CBD that has been developing over the past 20 years and spreads itself from Canary Wharf westward. The western end of it is messy, constrained, and it could do with a better pattern of development. Insofar as this project provides it, that seems to me to be an important contribution towards reducing supply constraints on the competitive development of this city as a whole. The White City site would also benefit from the coherence that design can provide.”
