Photo falling—Word falling—Break through in grey room—Towers, open fireWhen Branden Joseph, Reinhold Martin, and Felicity Scott founded Grey Room twenty-five years ago, they borrowed its title from a passage in William S. Burroughs's novel The Ticket That Exploded (1962). As a new editorial group takes the helm, we revisit this foundational part of the journal's identity to think about what it means to “break through in grey room” today.Burroughs wrote these lines amid a period of postwar, Atomic Age tumult. For a number of years he resided in the so-called International Zone of Tangier, Morocco—a semi-lawless place where sovereign state power was indefinite, a city on the cusp of decolonial revolution. In Burroughs's writings, it was fictionalized as the Interzone, “a place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum.”1 No single national authority controlled the International Zone; its interstitial status was poised between a waning colonial Europe and the waxing Pax Americana, of which Burroughs was a certain sort of privileged scion. For decades, the Burroughs Corporation, a manufacturer of adding machines founded by the author's grandfather, acted as a significant rival to (and occasional collaborator with) IBM. In the first half of the twentieth century, its computers aided astronomical calculations that guided U.S. sailors on the open sea and provided numerical and visual aids to bombing runs. Later on, in the second half of the twentieth century, it became a partner in the design of the U.S. military's burgeoning command and control systems, including the spectacular multimedia SAGE (Surface to Air Ground Environment) aerial defense system and its successor, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The Burroughs Corporation's business also thrived in the Global South, most notably under the patronage of the South African apartheid state. In this context, Burroughs's invocation to “break through in grey room” perhaps envisioned the possibility of passing beyond the programmed and planetary control that made up his real and imagined inheritance. ... Read more

An exploration of the dramatic transformation of London's financial district after 1945, viewed at four spatial scales: city, street, facade, interior.

In The City in the City, Amy Thomas offers the first in-depth architectural and urban history of London's financial district, the City of London, from the period of rebuilding after World War II to the explosive climax of financial deregulation in the 1980s and its long aftermath. Thomas examines abstract financial ideas, political ideology, and invisible markets as concrete realities; working on four spatial scales—city, street, facade, and interior—the book explores the grand plans, hidden alleys, neo-Georgian elevations, and sweaty dealing floors that have made the financial center work.

Moving from politics to sociology, institutions to bodies, development plans to office desks, Thomas unravels the rich entanglements between the structure of the UK's financial system and the structure of the environment in which it operates. Despite its physical and political centrality, this period of the City's architectural history occupies an academic lacuna. Longstanding prejudices about developer-led architecture and the real estate industry have obscured the postwar City's relevance. The book shows how, as currents of local government reform, nation-building, and globalization swept across Britain, the City became an ideological battleground for debates between politicians and financial institutions, real estate developers and architects, preservationists and so-called “proactive” planners throughout the latter half of the century.

The City of London is a place steeped in rich cultural and architectural heritage of immense national significance, yet it is also a highly privileged citadel at the core of global financial networks. The City in the City is both a critique and a celebration of this unique and complex place. ... Read more

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been no shortage of articles, podcasts, and reports on the future of work and the workplace. The acceleration of remote and hybrid working over the last three years has called into question the conventions of where, when, and how we work, and in particular, the extent to which the office building—an invention of the last century—remains essential and relevant today. Jeremy Myerson and Philip Ross’s new book, Unworking: The Reinvention of the Modern Office, emerges from within this conversation, responding to an urgency to rethink the office in the wake of a number of dramatic societal events and crises. According to the authors, the digital revolution, 2008 financial crisis, climate crisis, and the recent pandemic have reframed the way we work, demanding a reconceptualization of the workplace. ‘Unworking,’ they argue, is a term that captures the process by which we ‘unravel how we work…unbundle the assumptions that are baked into the modern office, and…unlearn the habits, management styles and workplace cultures that have traditionally defined our behaviour at work.’ (p. 203). As such, the term connotes a reimagining of the role of design, management theory, and technology in the contemporary workplace. ... Read more

The process of identifying, interpreting, and implementing societal values in university education is an essential part of responsible innovation and designing for equitable, inclusive, and sustainable societies. While there is now a well-defined and growing body of research on the theory and application of designing for values (or ‘value sensitive design’), at present the pedagogical dimension remains underexplored. Teaching Design for Values: Concepts, Tools and
Practices is a resource for teachers of design-based disciplines who wish to foreground values more explicitly in their classes. With fourteen chapters written by both TU Delft educators and international contributors, the book aims to examine the concepts, methods, and experiences of teaching design for values within a variety of fields, including urbanism, engineering, architecture, artificial intelligence, and industrial design. ... Read more

This issue of ATR considers numerous instances in which economic historians and historians of capitalism have turned to architecture as evidence of the workings of economic and financial systems. This collective position paper stems from the attempt to engage more directly with these disciplines; an attempt that was first manifested in the symposium “Built Orders of Finance, Risk and Racial Capitalism,” held online in early 2022. How are built orders shaped by processes of financialization, actuarial calculations of risk and the conditions of racial capitalism? How do built orders mobilize specific economic regimes? What kinds of evidence can be enlisted to discern the constitutive relationships established and maintained between architecture and regimes of finance? What scales are implied in these relationships? What is involved in their historicization? This article invites future conversations between the fields of scholarship it canvases to more comprehensively apprehend the terms, conditions, and histories of financialized space. ... Read more

Providing a future-proof workplace means ensuring a healthy and sustainable
work environment for all. Today women report more stress, health problems and
promotional barriers at work. It is widely known that this ‘leaky pipeline’ stems
from a range of social/cultural factors but to what extent has the workplace—a
physical, designed environment—influenced inequality? The offices we inhabit
may appear to embody a gender neutral mentality, but when we look back at the
history of the office we see that its norms and standards were formed decades ago,
when things weren’t so equal or straightforward. ... Read more

Today Richard Rogers + Partners’ Underwriting Room at Lloyd’s of London—known as “the Room”—is recognized as an icon of the High Tech movement, its modernity aestheticized through intersecting banks of escalators and a soaring twelve-story atrium. Yet on closer inspection, this interior represents a less satisfactory compromise. The product of years of protracted negotiations with a three hundred-year-old institution, the Room was conceived at a moment when the concept of risk, and the foundations of the insurance market, were transformed due to environmental crises, technological innovations and global financial deregulation. This paper contends that the changing nature of risk was mitigated through complex consultations over the design of the Room, simultaneously demanding new architectural solutions, whilst preserving the institution’s spatial and object-oriented rituals and mythologies. It concludes that the new Room, and the design process underpinning it, was a mode of institutional risk management in an age of uncertainty. ... Read more

Exhibition: Offices of the College van Bestuur, TU Delft TU Delft is not just a university, it is a workplace. Approximately 39% of personnel at TU Delft fall into the category ‘support staff’: the people who carry out the important work of organising the administrative, financial, built and HR-related infrastructure underpinning our university. While today the gender division of this role is more balanced, historically the roles of secretaries, assistants, and clerical workers were almost exclusively occupied by women. This gendered division of the workplace was commonplace in industrialised nations throughout the twentieth century and had a profound impact on the design of the office. This exhibition showcases the work of MSc Architecture students from the graduation studio ‘Future Bank’, investigating the development of this gendered division of labour through several key office buildings in the twentieth century. Drawing on the work of German sculptor Thomas Demand, students recreated iconic photographs of these buildings by making and photo- graphing paper models, a method that required intense scrutiny of architectural drawings, lighting, and materials. Curiously lacking the secretarial bodies that they were designed for, the photographs and models ask us to consider the experience of working in such spaces, whilst also casting them as stage sets for the performance of (gender) roles at work. Texts: Dr. Amy Thomas Photos: ‘Future Bank’ graduation studio (2021–22), Interiors Buildings Cities Group, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment ... Read more

Historically, the work of white Western male architects has dominated architectural history education. In recent decades a large body of scholarship has attempted to critically question this, highlighting and subverting mainstream disciplinary values, which are informed by gendered, racial, classist, and colonial biases. This chapter explores the process of addressing the methodologically and epistemologically gendered blind spots that reinforce structural inequality in the academy. We reflect on our experiences developing two interlinked Architectural History courses on the MSc Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences between 2019 and 2021 at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). The chapter explores the challenge of introducing traditionally marginalised forms of architectural knowledge – such as ones coming from feminist theory – within an existing institutional framework, while also interrogating the essential acts of collaboration between students, researchers, and teachers that take place in the process. ... Read more

In 1983, the workplace strategy and architecture practice, DEGW, published a highly influential study into the impact of information technology on the future of office buildings and the workplace, titled ‘Office Research: Buildings and Information Technology’ (ORBIT). Representing the first intensive research study into the organisational, technical and architectural demands of office work in Britain, the report concluded that the information age was rendering companies increasingly complex in their organisational and technological requirements, and ultimately more dependent on buildings. Although ostensibly a study about technological change, this paper argues that ORBIT should be viewed as a critical document in the formulation of the relationship between architects, suppliers, users and the state in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Sponsored by industry giants from real estate firms, construction and office supply companies, and government regulators, ORBIT brought together industries that were previously uneasy partners in post-war Britain but were being realigned under the Thatcher government's push for service sector innovation to revive the deindustrialised economy. Examined as both a product and instrument of neoliberal economic policy, the paper argues that the authors, sponsors and subjects of the research were linked by the demands of productivity, competition and performance both in and of the workplace. Within this analysis, DEGW's development of ‘architectural consultancy’, as a service that is distinct from architectural design, is interpreted as mode of repositioning the architect within the knowledge economy. ... Read more

The transformation of commercial architecture since WWII is a subject of growing interest among architectural historians. Scholars have explored the political-economic relationship between real estate cycles, finance capitalism, technology and the changing nature of corporate buildings. At the basis of these studies is an assumption that state-led processes of marketization, deregulation and privatisation indirectly affected the changing style and structure of office buildings from the 1970s onwards. However, as yet the direct involvement of the state and real estate industry in the research and development of new commercial building types has been unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by considering the collaboration between the British state, industry specialists and the office planning firm DEGW in the production of the highly influential Office Research Building Information Technology (ORBIT) Study, published in 1983. ORBIT was funded by the UK Department of Industry and the then state-owned British Telecom, alongside a consortium of industry specialists and real estate companies (including Greycoat Estates, Jones Lang Wootton and Steelcase), who were highly involved with the research and development of the project, including participation in monthly seminars. The study’s explicit aim was to assess ‘the impact of information technology upon office work and office workers’ (p.2). Yet underpinning the project were wider concerns about the changing accommodation needs of businesses at a time when Britain’s economy was being radically reconfigured by deregulation (enacted through co-sponsor, the Department of Industry). Using the material from the recently-opened DEGW archive at the University of Reading, this paper will investigate the ways that the political-economic interests of the sponsors shaped ORBIT and its legacy. The paper aims to expose the institutional processes through which neoliberal policies directly influenced the direction of office design in Britain (and subsequently America), interrogating ‘research’ as a non-neutral mediator between ideology and built form. ... Read more

A stock exchange is a spatial contradiction. Conceived as a marketplace for the trade in securities and other financial instruments, it is intended to provide a regulated forum as a fair and free market for its members: an open economic environment made possible by institutional confinement. Once the largest and most influential in the world, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) embodied this contradiction. Established in the heart of the imperial metropolis, the LSE emerged at the core of a global financial network that sustained Britain's territorial and ‘informal’ Empire. Concurrently, its self-regulated standing within the City of London and reliance on an esoteric world of gentlemanly connections positioned it as an establishment shaped and assisted by its locality.

Established to finance overseas trade in the seventeenth century, the London stock market materialised as the informal appendage of commodity markets in the alleyways surrounding the Royal Exchange. The next three hundred years saw the consolidation and growth of the LSE from classicising institutional grandeur, to concrete monolith in the 1970s and most recently, to the corporate serenity of Paternoster Square.

In mapping the movement of global markets alongside the shifting terrain of the LSE buildings, this paper addresses the manner in which the latter reflects the geographical scope of Britain's capital accumulation throughout the last three centuries. The LSE is looked at in the context of the rise and fall of the British Empire and in its more recent role as channel for international (and offshore) capital, in order to assess whether its architectural choices might reflect shifting attitudes towards economic expansion. At present there are no dedicated architectural accounts of the LSE at any point of its existence. This paper intends to traverse the gap between economic geography and architectural history by means of a methodology of spatial scales, moving from the cartographic to the bodily. In producing a dialogue between macroscopic and microscopic analysis, this enquiry intends to expose more tangible interpretations of an immaterial system that increasingly distorts our material reality. ... Read more

Prior to the deregulation of the Thatcher years, the City of London (London’s financial district) was largely self-regulated, operating via what Michael Moran refers to as ‘an explicit ideology of cooperative regulation’, institutionalized within a system of market-specific, club-like bodies, such as the Stock Exchange and Lloyds insurance market. Supervised and operated via its members, the components of each institution were tied together through a mode of exchange that prized face-to-face contact, reputation and trust, epitomised by the Stock Exchange motto Dictum Meum Pactum (‘My word is my bond’). The latter was made concrete via messenger-operated payment and clearing systems, organised around the hours of trade, provoking the need for proximity between institutions and specific architectural arrangements and resulting in an urban agglomeration of banks and other institutions in the immediate vicinity of the Bank of England.

The advent of digital technology entailed a decline in the economic significance of pedestrian activity in the City. The shift from manual, paper operations to onscreen transactions made redundant the kinetic network of brokers and messengers that once formed the circulatory system for banking and finance. This paper considers the way in which such shifts ultimately reconfigured the nature of the street as public space and argues that, as fundamental parts of the financial transaction were removed from the City’s thoroughfares, the street would no longer be an extension of the workplace, but a space of leisure. Exploring concepts such as ‘transaction’, ‘regulation’ and ‘exchange’ as social processes with material consequences, this paper attempts to chart the historical link between the street and economic activity, through analysis of the City’s myriad pedestrian ways and changing attitudes to planning public space in the fifty years following the Second World War. ... Read more