The trend-setting corporate headquarters of the 21stcentury are turning out to be not so much palaces as villages. Britain's business community, which took reluctantly and late to the polished granite halls and towering atria of the 1980s, has become the world's most enthusiastic exponent of the more informal architectural style of the moment. Management mantras about flexible working practices and flatter pyramids are taking physical shape.
Building work has been completed recently on Toyota's new UK headquarters and true to the tenets of our times, its distinguishing feature is a covered version of the village street. The street, suppressed by Modernist thinking 70 years ago so that buildings could float free and tall as standalone sculptural objects, has been reinvented.
Businessmen are telling architects that they want the serendipitous variety, the stimulus and freedom of the outside world to be distilled and injected into the corporate setting. Streets appear in the Motorola headquarters near Swindon, the new Niels Torp-designed British Airways headquarters near Heathrow and the Barclaycard headquarters by Fitzroy Robinson in Northampton. Current headquarters buildings, as the architect Rem Koolhaus has said, are really exercises in city making.
In contrast to five years ago, when the ability to sack staff was a measure of a company's virility, nowadays shareholder value depends on the reputation for stimulating the workforce to greater creativity and providing a setting pleasant enough for everyone to stay in their jobs. Reception areas are no longer hushed marble holding pens. The fashion is instead to offer visitors views of the company's busy and supposedly egalitarian life taking place in the distance, to see staff moving about in a framework of wood and cobbles or of steel and bright painted walls.
The four wings of the Toyota building, like those at British Airways, enclose their own courtyards as well as giving on to the "street". Instead of staff being swished off to distant destinations in lifts, some will trot up and down the many different staircases. At BA, they crisscross the space at high level as well, on little pedestrian bridges. Ranking by lift button is gone. "It is no coincidence that BA chose a Scandinavian architect, Niels Torp, to design Waterside," says Paul Finch, commissioner at CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. "The Scandinavians have a more socialist view of office communities."
Authority treads lightly on the lunch break too. "The canteens have been replaced with cafes, so you don't get the feeling there's a bloke upstairs who's telling you what you've got to eat," says Finch.
Socialising usefully is crucial to the new thinking: "Companies are looking to create productive cross-fertilisation. They are conscious that most of the ideas which resulted in Nobel prizes arose from casual encounters," says Robin Partington, director at Foster Associates. Partington has been responsible for the Arag Insurance headquarters in Dusseldorf and the Swiss Re headquarters in London, the "erotic gherkin" due to go up on the site of the Baltic Exchange.
The trend is to break down the "cell" structure of current office buildings. Previous architectural fashion reflected a business culture focused on individual effort rather than team working, in which hierarchy organised the "hive". Stepping beyond the open-plan office, the idea now is that the business as a whole will operate as a club, with staff piling into "dens" and enjoying a clubby camaraderie. More and more office space is now being given over to meeting rooms, project areas and team space, less to individual workstations.
Floor plates are also becoming larger to allow for more people to be in immediate contact with one another. But a floor the size of a football stadium carries with it the gloomy prospect of being the person furthest from the windows. Fosters have been experimenting with ways of making large areas more human by subdividing their skyscrapers into five-storey units looking out over gardens.
In Swiss Re's headquarters, six sets of atria, which are capped by gardens on every fifth floor, will spiral around the building, giving occupants the middle-distance views which they would have from townhouses. "Swiss Re wanted a range of different environments for their staff and for them to be able to move around spontaneously," says Partington. "The building will have domestic stairs between the floors as well as the lifts."
Surprisingly Britain, after being hopelessly behind only 15 years ago, is now leading America and Europe in the drive towards new working practices and the new physical structures needed to implement them. It was Stanhope Properties that, in their "groundscrapers" at Broadgate, first put up structures that combined the prestige and size lacking in the City, where buildings were generally old-fashioned and too small.
"The Germans are ahead on energy consumption and working conditions, but they are a lot more reluctant to change their working methods," says Partington. And in America, according to Frank Duffy of DEGW, the architectural practice and consultancy, some experimentation is happening among businesses in the smaller cities. New York, however, "once the icon of the future city, seems far less affected by pressures to innovate".
"The clients in Britain have changed enormously. Rogers and Foster couldn't get a job in Britain five years ago" says Tony Chapman, director of RIBA Awards. "But the half dozen big commercial practices have also set themselves higher standards."
It is widely thought that the introduction of competitions for building design has led to more inspirational choices being made and has given smaller manufacturing companies, whose headquarters jostle among the sheds in industrial parks, the possibility of commissioning more ambitious and lyrical architecture.
In fact, 200 years after commerce and manufacturing went their separate ways, architecture can be a way of overcoming British snobbery about industry. An architecturally bold factory allows management to put their offices on top of the assembly lines without losing face.
James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, told Chris Wilkinson of Wilkinson Eyre that he wanted to "Out-Hoover the Hoover building" in the design of a new elegant glass-and-steel headquarters in Wiltshire. Motorola's new factory and headquarters by Sheppard Robson, who also designed the Toyota building, is verging on the bombastic. Fletcher Priest, another emerging firm of architects, proudly declare that the jewel in the crown of their headquarters building for Avent, a manufacturer of designer baby products in Suffolk, is a vast window showing off their "injection stretch-blow moulding machine".
Inevitably, some industries are moving faster than others and manufacturers who trade on their design want it reflected in their headquarters buildings for obvious reasons. Consultancy, electronics and telecoms companies are likely to need new buildings sooner than lawyers, for instance, as they migrate to new ways of working. In some cases architects see a "trickledown effect" of more ambitious design influenced by an impressive new building such as the new BA headquarters.
Ian Davidson, of Lifshutz Davidson, who designed a new headquarters for SAE, the computer simulation and flight software makers near Brighton, believes this trickledown is already taking place in the aerospace industry. But clearly full employment and fat coffers are the main drivers in the trend towards a new building type that can symbolise dynamism to shareholders and offer an inspiration to staff - a testament to our time.
