Inland Revenue Centre Office Buildings, Nottingham

Inland Revenue Centre Office Buildings, Nottingham

This is a group of six office buildings constructed between 1993 and 1995 by Michael Hopkins & Partners for the Inland Revenue.

The six buildings are arranged on either side of a central boulevard running roughly east-west across the site. The two central blocks on the southern side are rhomboid in plan with corner stair turrets and central courtyards. The remaining four blocks are L-shaped, each with stair turrets positioned on the external angles and internal turrets at each end. The four buildings on the southern side are three storeys tall, whilst the two northern buildings flanking the Amenity Centre rise to four storeys.

All the buildings employ a unified palette of materials and architectural detailing. They are constructed of brick, concrete and steel with sections of lead and glazed walling and lead roofs.

The exteriors feature structural brick piers that divide the window bays. These piers are wider at ground floor level than the first floor, with concrete blocks set between them. The piers narrow again at the second storeys where they exist. The concrete sections continue across the windows, where the arched form of the concrete floor structure is expressed externally. The windows themselves have brise soleil screens to their bottom halves and projecting glazed canopies above.

The uppermost storeys of each building project over the lower levels and are clad in lead with smaller windows set beneath the projecting roof structures and surrounded by brise soleil. The corner stair towers are circular in plan with glazed brick walls in steel framing. Their uppermost sections feature lead panels before a final row of windows, beneath fabric caps that raise and lower according to heat levels. Where stair cores are contained within the ends of the L-shaped blocks, they are expressed externally with lead panels and a row of glazing topped with the same adjustable caps.

Each building has entrance points contained in bays adjacent to the stair turrets.

Internally, the buildings comprise open-plan offices on each floor arranged around central service cores containing lifts, toilet and kitchen facilities. The office floors were designed as flexible spaces that could function as fully open plan or be subdivided using moveable partitions.

At the lower floors, the brick structural piers and concrete floor slabs are expressed internally. The repeating arched sections of the concrete slabs create an undulating effect on the office ceilings. The top floor office spaces have exposed steel roof structure above with central rooflights, and timber cladding to the undersides of the roofs forms the ceilings. The walls on the top floors are also clad in timber.

The external stair turrets contain spiral stairs of steel and open treads with simple handrails. These stairs stand free of the surrounding wall structure and rise to the caps, with the raising and lowering mechanism exposed. The internal stairs have concrete walls.