gta Verlag / eth Zürich

The Lloyd's building in London was constructed in the early 1980s based on a vi­sion­ary design by Richard Rogers and Partners. Its planning and construction transformed the ideas of megastructure and intelligent environment into built reality. Mock-ups (prototypic full-size models) played a crucial role in this, enabling Rogers' team to test and refine the necessary novel constructions and procedures to minimize the risks of such an ­ambitious project. Lloyd's 1¿:¿1 is the first case study of one of the most important building projects of the late modern era. It showcases pre­viously unpublished ma­ter­ial from the ­archives of Rogers Stirk Harbour¿+¿Partners, Josef Gartner and Arup to reconstruct the planning process and demonstrate the working methods. Ex­amples of how mock-ups were used as research or planning ­instruments highlight their ­relevance for further developing building culture.

Buildings are made up of different layers which have different lifespans. Like human bodies, they are composed of skin, bones and organs, but unlike a living organism where the different parts have closely interwoven lifespans, a structure, a facade or a spatial plan become more durable if they can be changed independently of each other. Buildings are witnesses to other times, times before us and times yet to come. They are thresholds that let us peek at how previous generations lived and how coming generations might carry on. The timelessness that many strive for in architecture is not part of the nature of trans magazin. People and ideas come and go. It lives from the present, tries to reflect on the past, and looks towards a future.