Lloyd's listed: will it make the Grade? | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

Stumbled across the Lloyd’s of London building whilst running an errand. Soon to be Grade I listed by English Heritage, apparently:

Here is a building with glass lifts rising up its steely exterior. Here are stainless steel-clad service towers housing prefabricated kitchen and washroom modules lifted by cranes into place. Here is one of the most impressive of all 1980s atriums, soaring 60 metres up to a barrel-vaulted glass roof and criss-crossed by yellow-edged escalators. Even today, the mesmeric interior seems out of step with the apparently old-fashioned culture of Lloyd’s.

Design shocks follow one another up the building. On the 11th floor, doors from the hi-tech interior open into a perfectly preserved and wholly unforeseen committee room designed by Robert Adam, dating from the 1770s. It reminds me of the final scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when the astronaut, Dr David Bowman, lands – after his mind-bending journey through space – in a semblance of a Louis XVI hotel room: here hi-tech and classicism met face-to-incomprehending-face, just as they do in Lloyd’s.

It’s a remarkable slab of steel and concrete, a giant Transformer masquerading as a tower block. And looming in the vicinity is Norman Foster’s Gherkin, otherwise known as the Swiss Re building. If you squint your eyes, just a little, you could imagine you were trudging through a sci-fi metropolis like Mega-City One.