Location: London, United Kingdom.

Architect: Eric Parry Architects.

One Fen Court is a building located in the heart of London’s insurance district, providing 39,000 sqm of space over 16 levels of office and retail. The building is designed to provide high-quality office floor plates of up to 3,000sq.m. At the roof level, One Fen Court creates a new publicly accessible space at the heart of The City, a 2,200 sqm roof garden. The garden includes a gently undulating promenade, a 40-metre-long water feature, and a steel pergola supporting 90 Wisterias. The building is surrounded by a tight network of streets, and its specific geometry informed the strong, facetted massing, inflected façades, and acutely angled pillars. The building is conceived in three distinct elements: a two-storey base with its new public passageway and retail frontages, a main body with nine storeys of offices, and a glazed ‘crown’ that tapers outward and is marked by horizontal dichroic banding. The upper levels of the building make use of a closed cavity façade system, which allows for the reduction in the depth of a traditional triple-glazed system without the need for the introduction of additional onerous solar coating requirements.

One Fen Court brings civic presence and an increase in the public realm of the City of London. The building provides a level of public porosity to the heart of the site, marked by a great external room at the scale of the City’s banking halls. The ceiling of the hall is an audio-visual artwork providing visual linkage to the public roof garden. The garden is free to the public and requires no advanced booking. This is the first such rooftop garden in the City of London. One Fen Court takes its provision of first-class commercial office space as a starting point rather than a finishing point of its architectural vision. The building provides a high-quality working environment for its end-users, with expansive well-serviced floors. Beyond this, the building has a civic aspiration. With increasing density and bigger buildings, there is a greater need for the integration of public space into buildings. The garden at Fen Court provides open access for workers and visitors to the city alike, with stunning views of the cluster of taller towers to the north and the Thames to the south. It is a mid-level landscape built to the full extent of the block on which it sits and which can provide sanctuary from the city’s daily bustle.

Photo credit: Dirk Lindner.