Moor House is a large office building in the City of London.
It is located on the northern edge of the financial district and is one of the largest buildings in the area, standing 84 metres (276 ft) tall and with 29,000 square metres of floor space.
Completed in 2004, it was the first building to be designed for the forthcoming Crossrail, with a ventilation shaft to the station underneath the building. It has the deepest foundations in London, which reach down 57 metres (187 ft) and are specifically designed to withstand further tunneling below it in the future. The building cost £182 million to construct and was designed by Sir Norman Foster. Tenants include CLSA, Unicredit, Peel Hunt, TT International.
In April 1999 the building was involved in a dispute over whether it should be granted planning permission.
A number of other large buildings are being planned on sites nearby. These include a 43-storey, 140 metres (459 ft) residential tower at Milton Court. A 90 metres (295 ft) office tower at Ropemaker Place is also being developed by British Land.
Lord Norman Foster, in full Lord Norman Foster of Thames Bank, original name in full Norman Robert Foster (born June 1, 1935, Manchester, England) prominent British architect known for his sleek, modern buildings made of steel and glass.
Foster was trained at the University of Manchester (1956–61) in England and Yale University (1961–62) in New Haven, Connecticut. Beginning in 1963, he worked in partnership with Richard and Su Rogers and his wife, Wendy Foster, in a firm called Team 4. In 1967 he established his own firm called Foster Associates (later Foster + Partners). Foster’s earliest works explored the idea of a technologically advanced “shed,” meaning a structure surrounded by a lightweight shell or envelope.
Foster’s first buildings to receive international acclaim were the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts (1974–78) in Norwich, England, a vast, airy glass-and-metal-paneled shed, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters (1979–86) in Hong Kong, a futuristic steel-and-glass office building with a stepped profile. In these commissions, he established himself as one of the world’s leaders in high-tech design: for the latter building, for example, he had ingeniously moved elements such as elevators to the exterior of the building, where they could be easily serviced, and thus created open plans in the centre of the spaces. Balancing out this high-tech character, many of Foster’s buildings, including his Hong Kong office and the Commerzbank Tower (1991–97) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, utilized green spaces, or mini-atria, that were designed to allow a maximum amount of natural light into the offices. In this way, Foster created a more fluid relationship between inside and outside spaces and strove to impart a sense of humanity into an otherwise futuristic office environment.
Foster, a veteran of the Royal Air Force (1953–55) and an avid pilot, also applied his preference for open plans and natural lighting to airports such as Stansted (1981–91) outside London and Chek Lap Kok (1992–98) in Hong Kong and to the expressively simple American Air Museum (1987–97) at Duxford (England) airfield. At the turn of the 21st century, Foster extended his ideas to world landmarks. He rebuilt the Reichstag (1992–99) in Berlin after the reunification of Germany, adding a new steel-and-glass dome that surrounds a spiral observation platform, and he encased the court of the British Museum (1994–2000) in London under a steel-and-glass roof, creating an enclosed urban square within this famous museum building. His noteworthy buildings of the 21st century include the courtyard enclosure for the Smithsonian Institution’s Patent Office Building (2004–07) in Washington, D.C., Terminal 3 of the Beijing Capital International Airport (2003–08), and London’s City Hall (1999–2002).
The recipient of numerous awards for his work—including the Pritzker Prize (1999), the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for architecture (2002), and the Aga Khan Award (2007) for his design of the Petronas University of Technology in Malaysia—Foster was knighted in 1990 and granted a life peerage in 1999.