Joyce Lin - Palimpsest Zine

Professor Amber Bartosh and Shumi Bose
Group Work with AJ (Ayrton) Laucks, Alison Luo, and Sweni Prajapati
Spring 2024

By comparing Lloyd’s and the Daily Express Building alongside their similar programmatic counterparts, the Bank of England and No. 172 Fleet Street respectively, a greater analysis was able to be drawn against the two about the types of workspaces that are produced. The vertical circulation through Lloyd’s is decentralized between three main attachments and three emergency attachments, of which all are exterior to the enclosure, and the Daily Express Building is centralized within a main circulating core, with secondary circulation pushed to the edges, but still within the enclosure.

The typology of either building is only possible because of where it sits within the city. Lloyd’s is an enormous building, occupying an enormous site as a monolith, an object. As such, it is able to treat its four sides with relative equality. (This same enormity is what forces Lloyd’s to have a central atrium, bringing light and ventilation through the top, rather than the edges.) Comparatively, Fleet Street, of the Daily Express Building, can be read as a linearly collaged buildings, resulting in a building that seems to be plugged into the street elevation, and so must treat each side specifically based on the urban site conditions.

Behind the floor plan drawings of the four buildings, is the urban landscape within which the buildings operate. Fleet Street is a synecdoche for the newspaper industry as it historically hosted a number of newspaper, publishing, and printing companies. These buildings they occupied are outlined in the drawing. Similarly, the area around Lloyd’s was historically a hub for intercontinental shipping and trade (ie. imperialism and colonialism), including the site itself, starting first as the headquarters of the East India Company before being occupied by Lloyd’s, which started off as a shipping assurance company.