Commons Sense

The extension to the Houses of Parliament, built to house MPs' offices relieving unbearable crowding in the old place, is one of central London's most controversial buildings. In many ways it is also one of the most ingenious.

To build between Norman Shaw and Sir C. Barry working with A. W. N. Pugin was not the easiest task in the world. The parliamentary bank of the Thames must be one of the most photographed riversides in the world. Making an addition to it was clearly one of the most worrisome tasks in modern architecture. Scale, materials, and that old fashioned attribute, aspect, were all extremely problematic. And so was working for a committee of Members of Parliament, who are doubtless not the easiest of clients.

So far, press and public opinion have not been entirely kind to the Hopkins' new Parliamentary Building. 'Heavy' and 'ugly' are adjectives often applied -- but they were as well to both the Houses of Parliament, and Shaw's New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, once described as a 'very constabulary kind of building'. Charles Barry's design for the Houses of Parliament was selected largely because it provided 'an extended river facade of uniform character', a decision attacked equally by the Neo-Classicists, who wanted a proper building with the complete works of the Orders, and by the rising Neo-Goth school for whom the relative symmetry and regularity of the front were anathema. Even Pugin, Barry's partner who did all the Gothic detailing, was worried about the result; on a boat travelling down from Chelsea, he waved at the great building then emerging (without, as yet, its picturesque towers) and exclaimed to a friend 'All Grecian, Sir; Tudor details on a classic body'. [2] I thin k that, eventually, the new Hopkins building will seem to settle into its context as assuredly as its once controversial neighbours, leaving Big Ben's tower to dominate the whole composition.

The new building is made with great sensitivity for both site and users. The latter are 210 MPs and their staff--overflowing from the Neo-Gothic building across Bridge Street, in which they had become dreadfully cramped, as the population of the House grew with the elaboration of democracy and the colossal explosion of communications. Portcullis House (not perhaps the happiest of names) is a key link in what the architects call a 'Parliamentary campus', which runs from the Shaw buildings and further south to the Commons Chamber. [3] Corridors and tunnels (the main one under Bridge Street) allow MPs to get from their rooms to the great space in time to vote when the division bell rings.

A court surrounded by a wall of individual rooms was the generating idea of the building. It was derived equally from the archetypal form of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and from the new eco-thinking which comes largely from Germany, where thin plan forms are welcomed because they allow daylight to reduce need for artificial illumination, and where individual offices are required by management and unions alike. The parti of the building emerges from complex intercourse between urban, social and ecological ideals.

In conventional urban analysis, the building could not be bettered, It has shops at street level, a piano nobile on the first floor, where there are committee and meeting rooms, intermediate levels of MPs' offices, and an attic which contains climate control services and a few very lucky MPs, who have the most exquisite views. It fits into Bridge Street with a grain similar to the jumbly Classicism of the area. And it faces the river with the same strategy, in which individual rooms are the generator of the scale of the elevations -- not very different from that of the Palace of Westminster itself. Each MP's office has an oriel window, in which its tenant can calmly sit and look over the river, or Pugin, or Shaw or the endlessly changing pantomime of life in Whitehall.

The rectangular wall of rooms surrounds a central court that cannot be seen from the outside. Here, a glass roof is supported on American oak members flitched and bolted together with stainless steel. A grove of clipped trees is intended to evoke academe. It is hoped to generate casual conversation, occasional meetings, to be a forum of the whole campus: gossip, wit and other chatter are supposed to enliven the scene. Would Pitt, or Gladstone or Attlee have been happy in the place? You can certainly see Churchill strolling down the avenue puffing his cigar (would he be allowed to smoke nowadays?); the shade of Disraeli doing deals dodges about behind the trees; and Peel in his top hat would clearly be at home, inventing his coppers, who ended up in Norman Shaw's building next door. Parliamentarians of all times are bred out of the same stuff: they want to strut and they want to talk.

The glass roof is carried on props which fan from six main nodes that emerge here as columns. No site can have been more complex to organize. Two underground railway lines run under it at different angles. The architects were responsible for the very complex Piranesian tube station underneath the building (AR June 2000), the complications of which meant that the weight of most of the upper structure had to be carried down on just six points. Loads of the perimeter walls are taken down through their stone structure, but those from the inner court are borne by the columns, to which weight is carried by stone arches.