High-tech icon and stage of a James Bond film, Renault Distribution Centre, by Foster, to be renewed
02/08/2023.
[Swindon] UK
metalocus, ANDRÉS BLANCO
metalocus, ANDRÉS BLANCO
Renault Distribution Centre by Norman Foster. Photograph by Richard Davies, Courtesy Foster + Partners.
Project description by Foster + Partners
The Renault Centre has been described as the practice's most playful structure. However, its development owes much to earlier, perhaps more reticent schemes for clients such as Reliance Controls and Fred Olsen, which delivered inexpensive, flexible buildings to tight schedules. The Centre was commissioned as the French car manufacturer's main UK distribution facility. In addition to warehousing, it includes a showroom, training school, workshops, offices, and a staff restaurant. The notion that good design pays has almost become a cliche, but in this case, it is quantifiable: on the strength of the design, supportive local planners increased their site development limit from 50 to 67 percent, allowing a floor area of 25,000 square meters. This is housed within a single enclosure supported by brightly colored tubular masts and arched steel beams, forming a striking silhouette within its surrounding landscape.
The structural system that repeats itself to form this external outline is based around a 24 by 24-metre bay a much larger than usual planning module developed so as to maximise the planning flexibility of the internal spaces. This expansive horizontal span is combined with an internal clear height of 7.5 meters, allowing the Centre to accommodate a range of uses from industrial warehouse racking to its subdivision into office floors. Enveloped by a continuous PVC membrane roof, pierced by glass panels at each mast, the building is also stepped at one end, narrowing to a single, open bay that forms a porte-cochere alongside a double-height gallery. Primarily a showroom - as signified by suspended car body shells - the gallery was used by Renault as a popular venue for arts and social events, encouraging wider community involvement in the building.
Axonometry. Renault Distribution Centre by Norman Foster.Image courtesy Foster + Partners.
As much as its internal spaces, however, it is the building's almost festive Renault-yellow skeleton that gives the Centre such an identifiable character. Significantly, this created such a memorable image that the building, alone among the company's facilities, did not need to carry the Renault logo. In fact, it is so closely associated with the brand that for many years Renault used it as a backdrop in its advertising campaigns.
Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.
Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of a high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.
Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.
METALOCUS > 05.2017