Risk in “the Room:” Negotiating New Economic Paradigms in the Architecture of Lloyd’s of London Insurance Market

Abstract

Today Richard Rogers + Partners’ Underwriting Room at Lloyd’s of London—known as “the Room”—is recognized as an icon of the High Tech movement, its modernity aestheticized through intersecting banks of escalators and a soaring twelve-story atrium. Yet on closer inspection, this interior represents a less satisfactory compromise. The product of years of protracted negotiations with a three hundred-year-old institution, the Room was conceived at a moment when the concept of risk, and the foundations of the insurance market, were transformed due to environmental crises, technological innovations and global financial deregulation. This paper contends that the changing nature of risk was mitigated through complex consultations over the design of the Room, simultaneously demanding new architectural solutions, whilst preserving the institution’s spatial and object-oriented rituals and mythologies. It concludes that the new Room, and the design process underpinning it, was a mode of institutional risk management in an age of uncertainty.