One Fen Court

One Fen Court is located at the heart of London’s insurance district. It provides 39,000sqm of space over 16 levels of office and retail. Scaled at the dimensions of a city block, it provides high quality uninterrupted office floor plates of up to 3,000sq.m. At roof level, One Fen Court creates a new publicly accessible space at the heart of The City– a 2,200sqm roof garden. This new garden is a prominent new public resource for the city. The landscape on the roof includes a gently undulating promenade, a 40 metre long water feature and a steel pergola supporting 90 Wisterias. A restaurant is located directly below the garden. Surrounded by a tight network of streets, One Fen Court cannot be viewed in its entirety from any one view at ground level. The specific geometry of the site informed the strong, facetted massing, inflected façades and acutely angled pillars which, correspond with the sweep of Fenchurch Street and its locale. In section 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. This last element provides four floors of offices and a restaurant at the 14th floor. The upper levels of the building make use of a closed cavity façade system whereby low pressure air is pumped individually into each triple glazed cladding panel. This system allows for the reduction in 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. It also brings colour. The use of Dichroic banding on ‘The Crown’ and two-tone metal finishes to the lower level brise soleil brings an ever changing kinetic colour palette to the building when seen at the grain of the street or the greater canvas of the cityscape. At street level narrow alleyways are part of fabric of the City of London and such an alley crosses the site bringing a level of public porosity to the heart of the site. This heart is 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. It is conceived of as a ‘camera obscura’ taking both live feed and pre-composed video. A series of films created by artists Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier on this technological canopy enliven the daily commute of the office workers below. The room is an entry point for the public via lifts up to the roof garden. The garden is free to the public and requires no advanced booking. This is the first such of 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 high quality working environment for its end user, with expansive well serviced floors. Beyond this though, the building has a civic aspiration. With increasing density and bigger buildings there is a greater and greater need for the integration of public space into buildings. Under such conditions there is a pressing need for the inhabitation of previously under used spaces. 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.