Triton Court, is a white elephant. Originally several fusty old Edwardian insurance offices, it was slammed together in the early 1980s as a brand new financial HQ. This was the post big-bang, cash injected city of stripy shirts and braces - reeling under the heady fumes of American neo-liberalism. The interior was stripped of all vestiges of stuffy historicism, and re-imagined as a downtown financial hub. It contains all the de-rigeur trappings - scenic glazed lifts, marble columns, marble floors, water features, gold fish, plastic plants and vast expanses of blank beige cladding all centred around that most emblematic motif of 80s corporate culture - the glazed atrium.
The retained historic facades struggled to keep this bloated money monster in check. A greedy double height mansard was added to maximise the floor area and large cubes of incongruous mirror glass bulge out through this at roof level. To provide speedy caffeine powered access to the atrium an out of scale po-mo glass entrance was torn into the Edwardian facade.
The resulting sorry heap is a relic of proud English decorum impregnated with a bloated American interior. As such it was never the nerve centre powerhouse it was dressed up as. Both physically and ontologically Triton Court was always peripheral to the big games played in the square mile down the road. As the 80s and 90s wore through it became clear there was little of substance propping up the shoulder pads and the marble veneer began to crack.
I'm drawn to distant memories of the 1980s marketing for Milton Keynes below - very slick but we know what would happen if the camera angles were less well choreographed.
Thirty years later, it's getting ripped out. This is the recurring fate for skin deep make-overs that punch above their weight. This was no Broadgate or Lloyds of London - it was never a place for real financial superpowers just for those who yearned to look like them.
No comments:
Post a Comment