Boots D90 West Headquarters Building

Boots D90 West Headquarters Building

Headquarters office building on Thane Road, Nottingham, designed 1966–8 by the American practice Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with chief architect Bruce Graham, in collaboration with the British firm Yorke Rosenberg Mardall, chief architect Brian Henderson. The building was altered and refurbished in 1999–2000.

The structure features a zinc-sprayed matt-black welded steel frame of 13 96-foot bays with 5-foot deep steel lattice trusses. The first floor is an independent reinforced concrete slab supported on columns, with a flat roof and no visible plant.

The building adopts a rectangular plan with an internal courtyard. It rises two storeys, with the narrower lower storey set into fill except at the main entrance. The lower floor is lit by the integral internal courtyard. The exterior displays remarkable Miesian purity. Only the upper storey is visible, set within a man-made gently sloping raised landscape. The building is set back behind a projecting cornice and cruciform-beam columns—four per side—which create a particularly powerful corner composition. A white marble sill reads as a plinth when viewed from a distance. The original glazing sits between full-height mullions at 5-foot intervals. The courtyard elevation is similarly treated but of double height, with the white sill detail forming a first-floor band where the concrete construction and columnar support are visibly expressed.

The interior is accessed via double doors on the lower floor, fronted by a fully glazed screen to the former post room. A cantilevered dog-leg stair with a double lower flight and finely precast concrete and steel balustrade rises to the main office floor. Beyond lies the executive office and conference suite, retaining full-height dark timber partitions and doors of exceptional quality. The three other sides round the courtyard are arranged as open-plan workspace, with Venetian blinds serving as an additional sun screen. The surviving interior details were designed by the architects. The inner courtyard contains a shallow reflecting pool edged with paving.

Boots D90 was an exceptionally prestigious office building, designed according to American out-of-town planning principles. Although Heinz, Hayes in LB Hillingdon was the first example in this genre, Boots developed the idiom with greater sophistication, employing the high-class welded steel made fashionable in the American Mid-West by Mies van der Rohe and further developed for corporate offices by Bruce Graham. The open-plan offices were daringly innovative when first opened, incorporating oak carrels—head-high units incorporating a desk and cupboards for every member of staff—set out according to the grid plan of the services and lighting in the building. These carrels have since been removed.

The building was extremely influential. It marked the involvement of a British firm who became practitioners of refined welded steel structures in their own right, and it showed the way for a younger generation of architects—Foster and Rodgers were experimenting with steel at this time—to develop the high-tech steel office buildings for which Britain is now internationally renowned.

A refurbishment in 1999–2000 included the addition of a new three-storey block to the east and a linking bridge. Neither the new block nor the link bridge form part of the listed building.