Holland House - City of London (London) - Art Deco - Art Nouveau on Waymarking.com

Hidden in the giant shade of jewel of contemporary architecture, The Gherkin, is one of the most precious Art Deco structures in Britain - Holland House by a prominent Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage.

Greatly inspired by his travels in America, H.P. Berlage’s completion of Holland House in the City of London in 1916 created one of the first steel-framed buildings in Europe.

For all the wartime destruction and crass redevelopment, the City of London still contains many almost mythical curiosities. For architects, one of the most fascinating of these is the great Dutch architect H.P. Berlage’s office building in Bury Street.

Originally, this dog-leg thoroughfare was one of the narrowest streets within the historic walls, but when Foster & Partners’ Swiss Re was built, the whole of the street’s west side was demolished to create the forecourt needed to bring the circular Gherkin down to the ground in the middle of the ancient, tightly-ravelled urban texture. This means that now you can see Berlage’s main facade straight on from the new piazzetta, instead of obliquely, as it had to be when it was built.

Holland House, built in 1916 was, as Pevsner remarked, “very alien to the London of its date”: strongly vertical in emphasis with closely spaced thin mullions, set on a regular grid and chamfered in plan to emphasise their slenderness. In the glazed strips between the mullions, floors are marked by ceramic spandrels, each with a square boss in its centre. The frame structure is steel, one of the first in London — and indeed the whole of Europe.

[source: www.landmarkplc.com]