The building is also dedicated to “wellness”, which means it has a 41st floor “retreat” and a glass climbing wall on the 25th floor, so you can practice your skills with panoramas of London vertiginously spread before you. Some of it is permanent, some part of a changing display. So 22 Bishopsgate, which is designed by Karen Cook of the architects PLP, has art, colourful and splashy, in the triple-decker entrance lobby and the high-speed double-decker lifts, built into the glass canopies that overhang the pavement and an “art street” running down one side. Employees might come in slightly less often, but when they do they will be offered a better experience: less battery-farmed, more free-range. A former trend towards smaller desk spaces will be reversed. From now on, is the idea, businesses will have to work harder to attract people into the office. “We’re all social animals … people want to experience life.” He believes that, in the world of office design, Covid-19 provides an occasion to realise that “everyone had got stuck”. “An office building should be lively,” he says. Lipton calls it a “vertical village”, designed to make work sociable and pleasurable. ‘Colourful and splashy’: 22 Bishopsgate’s art-covered glass canopy at street level. So far it is 60% let, to businesses such as the US law firms Cooley and Covington & Burling and the insurance companies Hiscox and Beazley, with more tenants “on the way”. Stuart Lipton, one of Lipton Rogers’ founders, believes that 22 Bishopsgate happily meets the demands and desires of a world that has changed in ways that no one predicted. The project, which stands in the City of London, has been developed by Lipton Rogers Developments on behalf of the investment managers Axa and an international consortium of investors. Is there such a thing as too big when it comes to such buildings? And is so much space needed at a time when remote working and the altered habits of the pandemic might conceivably reduce the demand for conventional office space? At 278 metres high – or 62 storeys – it comes second only to the 310-metre Shard as the tallest building in the country. At an all-inclusive total of just over 195,000 sq metres, it’s probably the largest office building ever built in Britain. 22 Bishopsgate is big, as large as a container ship perched on its end.
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