UK - London United Kingdom Dirty Skies View down the Victoria Embankment towards the Palace of Westminster. View of London from The London Eye. Westminster Bridge and houses of parliament viewed from the south side of the River Thames in Westminster Palace Westminster station building Portcullis House.
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Architecture The building was designed by Michael Hopkins and Partners and incorporates Westminster tube station below it. A thick slab of concrete separates Portcullis House from the station, reportedly to defend against any underground bomb attacks.
The load is borne by the walls, without interior posts. The corners of the building are hung from the roof using massive steel beams. The design life of years meant that aluminium bronze was chosen for exposed metal on the roof and walls. The building's curious profile, with its rows of tall chimneys, is intended to recall the Victorian Gothic design of the Palace of Westminster and to fit in with the chimneys of the Norman Shaw Building next door.
Portcullis House's chimneys are not used to expel fumes but are part of an unpowered air conditioning system, which is designed to draw air through the building by exploiting natural convection flows. It is based on the system used in in the Eastgate Centre, Harare , Zimbabwe. Those working in the building would argue that this system is rarely effective enough. The building itself is created to look and feel like a ship inside. All the offices and passages are made up with bowed windows and light oak finishing.
Each floor looks identical to the others except the ground floor which houses the main courtyard with ship-like metallic sails suspended overhead. The courtyard is decorated with trees and two shallow baths of water. The offices at Portcullis House are generally in sets of two sharing a common bay in the centre. Each floor is unofficially allocated to a different political party so that generally MPs with similar politics are kept together.
The first floor houses a number of conference suites and committee rooms, which are named after famous politicians Betty Boothroyd , Harold Macmillan , Margaret Thatcher , Clement Attlee , Harold Wilson , and Jo Grimond. The high-tech style of Portcullis House is also evident externally, where fourteen tall, bronze chimneys line its roof. Thirteen of these chimneys are used for natural ventilation, while the fourteenth is a flue for mechanical systems.
They are all positioned on the roof due to a lack of underground space, but by echoing the aesthetic of the chimneys of the adjacent Norman Shaw building and Palace of Westminster, they help the building relate to its setting.
The chimneys are positioned on top of a series of box girders that double as air ducts and form a spider-like pattern on its roof. These box girders then rest on prestressed sandstone columns expressed on the building's facade. Between the sandstone columns, the studio also developed prefabricated high-tech cladding, including ducting, windows, sun-shading and a "light shelf".
The atrium is complete with trees and water features, with a secure underpass that links the courtyard to the Houses of Parliament. The rest of the ground floor, which surrounds the atrium, features an open arcade that extends along the two street frontages, sheltering the entrance to the tube station and a row of shops. The upper floors of Portcullis House are populated with offices around its perimeter, which tail off from a corridor that looks down into the atrium through the glass roof.
All the interior finishes are designed to look and feel like a ship — with bowed windows and light oak finishing. Portcullis House is complete with boreholes that use groundwater for cooling, which is one of the reasons it received a BREEAM Excellent rating — the highest available at the time of its completion. It was also nominated for the Stirling Prize.
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