In 1983, the workplace strategy and architecture practice, DEGW, published a highly influential study into the impact of information technology on the future of office buildings and the workplace, titled ‘Office Research: Buildings and Information Technology’ (ORBIT). Representing the first intensive research study into the organisational, technical and architectural demands of office work in Britain, the report concluded that the information age was rendering companies increasingly complex in their organisational and technological requirements, and ultimately more dependent on buildings. Although ostensibly a study about technological change, this paper argues that ORBIT should be viewed as a critical document in the formulation of the relationship between architects, suppliers, users and the state in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Sponsored by industry giants from real estate firms, construction and office supply companies, and government regulators, ORBIT brought together industries that were previously uneasy partners in post-war Britain but were being realigned under the Thatcher government's push for service sector innovation to revive the deindustrialised economy. Examined as both a product and instrument of neoliberal economic policy, the paper argues that the authors, sponsors and subjects of the research were linked by the demands of productivity, competition and performance both in and of the workplace. Within this analysis, DEGW's development of ‘architectural consultancy’, as a service that is distinct from architectural design, is interpreted as mode of repositioning the architect within the knowledge economy.@en

The transformation of commercial architecture since WWII is a subject of growing interest among architectural historians. Scholars have explored the political-economic relationship between real estate cycles, finance capitalism, technology and the changing nature of corporate buildings. At the basis of these studies is an assumption that state-led processes of marketization, deregulation and privatisation indirectly affected the changing style and structure of office buildings from the 1970s onwards. However, as yet the direct involvement of the state and real estate industry in the research and development of new commercial building types has been unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by considering the collaboration between the British state, industry specialists and the office planning firm DEGW in the production of the highly influential Office Research Building Information Technology (ORBIT) Study, published in 1983. ORBIT was funded by the UK Department of Industry and the then state-owned British Telecom, alongside a consortium of industry specialists and real estate companies (including Greycoat Estates, Jones Lang Wootton and Steelcase), who were highly involved with the research and development of the project, including participation in monthly seminars. The study’s explicit aim was to assess ‘the impact of information technology upon office work and office workers’ (p.2). Yet underpinning the project were wider concerns about the changing accommodation needs of businesses at a time when Britain’s economy was being radically reconfigured by deregulation (enacted through co-sponsor, the Department of Industry). Using the material from the recently-opened DEGW archive at the University of Reading, this paper will investigate the ways that the political-economic interests of the sponsors shaped ORBIT and its legacy. The paper aims to expose the institutional processes through which neoliberal policies directly influenced the direction of office design in Britain (and subsequently America), interrogating ‘research’ as a non-neutral mediator between ideology and built form. @en

A stock exchange is a spatial contradiction. Conceived as a marketplace for the trade in securities and other financial instruments, it is intended to provide a regulated forum as a fair and free market for its members: an open economic environment made possible by institutional confinement. Once the largest and most influential in the world, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) embodied this contradiction. Established in the heart of the imperial metropolis, the LSE emerged at the core of a global financial network that sustained Britain's territorial and ‘informal’ Empire. Concurrently, its self-regulated standing within the City of London and reliance on an esoteric world of gentlemanly connections positioned it as an establishment shaped and assisted by its locality. Established to finance overseas trade in the seventeenth century, the London stock market materialised as the informal appendage of commodity markets in the alleyways surrounding the Royal Exchange. The next three hundred years saw the consolidation and growth of the LSE from classicising institutional grandeur, to concrete monolith in the 1970s and most recently, to the corporate serenity of Paternoster Square. In mapping the movement of global markets alongside the shifting terrain of the LSE buildings, this paper addresses the manner in which the latter reflects the geographical scope of Britain's capital accumulation throughout the last three centuries. The LSE is looked at in the context of the rise and fall of the British Empire and in its more recent role as channel for international (and offshore) capital, in order to assess whether its architectural choices might reflect shifting attitudes towards economic expansion. At present there are no dedicated architectural accounts of the LSE at any point of its existence. This paper intends to traverse the gap between economic geography and architectural history by means of a methodology of spatial scales, moving from the cartographic to the bodily. In producing a dialogue between macroscopic and microscopic analysis, this enquiry intends to expose more tangible interpretations of an immaterial system that increasingly distorts our material reality.@en

Prior to the deregulation of the Thatcher years, the City of London (London’s financial district) was largely self-regulated, operating via what Michael Moran refers to as ‘an explicit ideology of cooperative regulation’, institutionalized within a system of market-specific, club-like bodies, such as the Stock Exchange and Lloyds insurance market. Supervised and operated via its members, the components of each institution were tied together through a mode of exchange that prized face-to-face contact, reputation and trust, epitomised by the Stock Exchange motto Dictum Meum Pactum (‘My word is my bond’). The latter was made concrete via messenger-operated payment and clearing systems, organised around the hours of trade, provoking the need for proximity between institutions and specific architectural arrangements and resulting in an urban agglomeration of banks and other institutions in the immediate vicinity of the Bank of England. The advent of digital technology entailed a decline in the economic significance of pedestrian activity in the City. The shift from manual, paper operations to onscreen transactions made redundant the kinetic network of brokers and messengers that once formed the circulatory system for banking and finance. This paper considers the way in which such shifts ultimately reconfigured the nature of the street as public space and argues that, as fundamental parts of the financial transaction were removed from the City’s thoroughfares, the street would no longer be an extension of the workplace, but a space of leisure. Exploring concepts such as ‘transaction’, ‘regulation’ and ‘exchange’ as social processes with material consequences, this paper attempts to chart the historical link between the street and economic activity, through analysis of the City’s myriad pedestrian ways and changing attitudes to planning public space in the fifty years following the Second World War.@en

A stock exchange is a spatial contradiction. Conceived as a marketplace for the trade in securities and other financial instruments, it is intended to provide a regulated forum as a fair and free market for its members: an open economic environment made possible by institutional confinement. Once the largest and most influential in the world, the London Stock Exchange (LSE) embodied this contradiction. Established in the heart of the imperial metropolis, the LSE emerged at the core of a global financial network that sustained Britain's territorial and ‘informal’ Empire. Concurrently, its self-regulated standing within the City of London and reliance on an esoteric world of gentlemanly connections positioned it as an establishment shaped and assisted by its locality. Established to finance overseas trade in the seventeenth century, the London stock market materialised as the informal appendage of commodity markets in the alleyways surrounding the Royal Exchange. The next three hundred years saw the consolidation and growth of the LSE from classicising institutional grandeur, to concrete monolith in the 1970s and most recently, to the corporate serenity of Paternoster Square. In mapping the movement of global markets alongside the shifting terrain of the LSE buildings, this paper addresses the manner in which the latter reflects the geographical scope of Britain's capital accumulation throughout the last three centuries. The LSE is looked at in the context of the rise and fall of the British Empire and in its more recent role as channel for international (and offshore) capital, in order to assess whether its architectural choices might reflect shifting attitudes towards economic expansion. At present there are no dedicated architectural accounts of the LSE at any point of its existence. This paper intends to traverse the gap between economic geography and architectural history by means of a methodology of spatial scales, moving from the cartographic to the bodily. In producing a dialogue between macroscopic and microscopic analysis, this enquiry intends to expose more tangible interpretations of an immaterial system that increasingly distorts our material reality.@en