Technical & Practice

摘要

'We're not architects,' says Arup Associates director Declan O'Carroll, explaining the London practice's role in Harlequin 1, a building set to house BSkyB's broadcast and sports news departments, which was handed over for final fit out in March and will open next year. O'Carroll's point is that, as an integrated design practice, Arup Associates provided not only architectural services (a luxury on this type of project), but also expertise in other disciplines such as structural and services design. Indeed when Arup Associates was founded in 1963, practitioners including Denys Lasdun regarded this as an unfair advantage. But with the exponential growth of demands on building performance, there's a strong argument for this paradigm, especially in the case of a project as complex as Harlequin 1.