Back in 2014 Legal & General Property acquired One Piccadilly, the huge office block on Piccadilly Gardens that includes a series of eateries on the ground floor, plus Piccadilly Pavilion – the concrete bit that juts out across the gardens and includes a rather tatty Café Nero.
The Pavilion itself also included the much hated ‘Berlin Wall’ free-standing 20-food concrete slab which was demolished at the tail end of 2020.
Both the wall and the Pavilion were designed by Japanese architect Tadao Andois, as part of the renovation of the gardens at the turn of the Millennium – however, they’ve not been well-received by anybody really in the ensuing 20 years.
SpaceInvader’s work on ONE Piccadilly
Now, Legal & General have unveiled plans to modernise and renovate the remaining Pavilion building, and they’ve enlisted the services of architects SpaceInvader to design it.
SpaceInvader have been responsible for the re-design of in interiors of One Piccadilly itself, and now turn their skills to the Pavilion – looking to “enliven” the current design with an art installation across the entirety of the southern wall.
The main part of the proposal would see the roof connecting the two parts of the pavilion removed to create two separate buildings.
The proposed new Pavilion
With the addition of the art installation to the southern elevation of the building, the scheme aims to create better “permeability” and make access to the gardens more visible and inclusive, according to a planning statement by the developer.
The scheme is currently still in the planning stage, and therefore will await approval before any work can begin. What do you think? Are these plans bold enough, or will they make very little impact on the current dire strait the gardens find themselves in?
