Grand designs

The porcupine skylines of the world's great commercial hubs are in constant flux. Attenuated offices pierce the smog, while street grids are bounded ever more tightly by great planes of glass, steel and marble, the material language of the corporation. Yet despite this international boom, the corporate HQ is today an endangered architectural typology.

There was a time, at the height of modernism, when corporate architecture drove design, when technological progress, innovation and the avant-garde produced an explosion of superb buildings - the green-glass delicacy of New York's Lever House, the slick black of Owen Williams' art deco Daily Express building in London, and the same architect's awesomely modern factory for Boots in Nottingham. These proud, sometimes pompous structures continue to define both cityscapes and brands, as engrained in the popular consciousness as a city's squares or stations.

Between the 1920s and the early 1960s, the world's best architects spent a great deal of their time building for ambitious corporate clients who wanted their brands, values and achievements embodied in built form. The best have proved remarkably durable, from New York's Woolworth and Chrysler buildings to Chicago's Sears Tower.
But by the final third of the 20th century, large corporations had begun to shy away from self-aggrandising buildings and big civic presences. The increasing difficulty of finding central plots in major cities, allied with a reluctance to invest capital in exorbitant real estate, sent HQ building-projects out of fashion. Instead corporations turned to the flexibility of leasing, unwilling to spend on new architecture in a volatile business world. As the radical speed of change in new office technologies brought with it dreams of hot-desking and home-working, the future of the big HQ looked in doubt.

Yet corporate architecture remains perhaps the most powerful method of expressing brand value. Those few companies - big and small - who make an effort, truly stand out.

The histories of modern architecture and corporate building are intimately interlinked. In 1910, the architect and industrial designer Peter Behrens created the world's first co-ordinated corporate brand, for the German company AEG. His strategy embraced everything from logo to marketing literature to product ranges. But it was Behrens' architecture that was at the fore.

His 1909 turbine factory in Berlin was one of two keystones in the development of modernism. The other was Frank Lloyd Wright's 1904 building for the Larkin mail-order company, in Buffalo, New York, which introduced the now ubiquitous office atrium. Both Behrens' and Wright's buildings were austere, formal creations of brick and glass - blocky, simple and monumental.

Wright's Johnson Wax building (1936-39) in Racine, Wisconsin, attempted to create a humane working environment - fewer hierarchical floorplates; strange, exposed mushroom columns which freed up space; curvaceous streamlined corners - all of which presaged a new, futuristic architecture. Mies van der Rohe's Seagram building in New York (1954-58) remains one of the sleekest and most influential of skyscrapers: a perfect glass box, the colour of the Seagram product embodied in the subtly brown-tinted glazing.

The postwar era also saw the emergence of the campus office, usually associated with companies based on university grounds. Eero Saarinen (architect of JFK airport's sculptural TWA terminal, certainly the best bit of airline branding ever) defined the genre with his General Motors technical centre in Warren, Michigan (1948-56), and subsequently on campuses for IBM, Bell and John Deere.

A skyscraper boom followed in the next few decades, exemplified in Chicago's Sears Tower (1974-76, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) and New York's AT&T building (1984, now the Sony building), designed by Philip Johnson, the first major expression of post-modernism with a neo-classical tint.

The 1980s did not produce many masterpieces, but it did at least throw up radical ideas. Britain's high-tech architects began to surpass the big beasts of a by-now dulled US corporate-architectural culture, most notably with Norman Foster's Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, and Richard Rogers' Lloyd's building.

The typology arguably never recovered from the recession that followed. But some exceptions continue to reinforce the potential of corporate architecture - not just for brand-building and ego, but also for employees' comfort and pride, and for the enhancement of their city.

30 St Mary Axe (Swiss Re), London 1997-2004

Rising a couple of blocks away from his old partner Richard Rogers' Lloyd's Building, Norman Foster's streamlined skyscraper launched a new generation of ambitious towers in the city. Although a resounding international success and one of the world's most recognisable contemporary structures, it initially proved awkward to let. This was at least partly due to its initial association with its builder, Swiss Re, which was too closely identified with the project for other potential lessees - hence the name change to its address. Nevertheless it has proved a catalyst for major new towers in the city, such as Renzo Piano's Shard London Bridge, due to start construction this year.

Lloyd's of London1979-84

Lloyd's may have started in a 17th-century coffee house, but it graduated to the machine age with Richard Rogers' astonishing building, which marked a new era in London architecture. With services, lifts and guts on the exterior, the interiors were left clear and expansive; while from the outside, the building resembled a huge engine for making money. Rearing up next to the Victorian iron and glass of Leadenhall Market, the Lloyd's building looked at once striking and at home in its context, signalling the dominance of Lloyd's in the market and its presence in the City.

Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Hong Kong1979-86

Norman Foster's magnificent building is still one of the most dramatic HQs of the modern era. By constructing an exoskeleton, the architect cleared the internal spaces of structure and produced free-flowing floors with astounding views across Hong Kong island. The design also liberated ground space, making the building's undercroft both a shortcut through the island's unbelievably dense fabric, and a heavily used public plaza in a city where civic space is rare. Together with Richard Rogers' Lloyd's building, the Hongkong and imbued a flagging commercial modernism with a sense of daring and excitement - but also managed to harness the scale of corporate building to benefit the public realm.

Hearst Headquarters, New York 2000-06

Another entry from Foster & Partners and another building which looks set to reinvigorate a skyline. New York, home of the skyscraper, had fallen behind: a combination of recession, brutally efficient building techniques (which preclude all but the most basic architectural expression) and the effects of 9/11 had led to a stagnant skyline. The Hearst tower exerts a crystalline presence over midtown, its facets bouncing light back down onto the surrounding streets and sparkling at sunset like pink champagne. The simple act of cutting away the corners gives unexpected views diagonally across the city (as opposed to across the street grid) and also chimes with the theatrical art deco of its retained, 1920s base.

The New York Times Tower, New York Occupancy due in 2007

With its diaphanous skin, Times Tower's 52 storeys seem to dissolve into the sky. Renzo Piano has long excelled at corporate HQs, becoming the established architect of good taste - even if his refinement can occasionally segue into extremely competent blandness. But Times Tower does for Times Square what his Daimler Benz towers do for Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, laying a respectable, slick gloss on the cityscape. Due for completion later this year, the elegant building will be a huge boon to its media brand, and a competitor to the Hearst tower a little further uptown.

Novartis Campus, Basel Under construction

On a huge former industrial site on the banks of the Rhine, pharmaceutical firm Novartis is building the most architecturally ambitious chunk of corporate city currently under construction. Rather than opt for a single, monolithic structure, or even a consistent style, Novartis has carefully employed some of the most high-profile architects in the world - Rafael Moneo, Frank Gehry, Sanaa, and Diener & Diener - to create a dynamic series of places and a virtual museum of contemporary architecture. What I have seen so far remains (perhaps appropriately for big pharma) a little sterile, but is an exemplar of long-term ambition. It has also prompted local rivals Roche to commission a stunning tower - to be Switzerland's tallest - for its campus, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, architects of London's Tate Modern.

McLaren Technology Centre, Woking, England 1998-2004

Foster again, here with a building as streamlined as the Formula 1 cars manufactured inside. The site houses a group of F1 high-tech companies that encompass the whole process - from design and testing to construction - in a series of curvaceous buildings set by a large artificial lake. This provides cooling for the interiors, whose spaces are arranged around a series of double-height internal streets - progress through the building feels more like a stroll through a mini-city than a factory complex. The structures are kept low and unobtrusive, making minimal impact on the surrounding countryside. This inconspicuousness makes the revelation of the brilliantly clean and bright interiors all the more astonishing.

ING Bank, Budapest 2003

A little off-the-wall, this one, but a fascinating attempt at embracing a landmark building and subverting it with a new extension. ING's first Hungarian office - from 1993 - was skilfully inserted into an old palace on Budapest's grandest boulevard by Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat. His second building for ING also sits inside a historic building, albeit one from a very different era - the communist trade union HQ. Grandly modernist, it is a powerful building, adorned with reliefs of heroic proletarian workers. This has been intelligently restored and converted, while a new wing, in glass, ripples along the street frontage, its skewed angles contrasting with the rational modernity of the old building. Old and new meet, clash a little and agree to continue. Extremely clever and hugely recognisable.