Abstract

Today Richard Rogers + Partners’ Underwriting Room at Lloyd’s of London—known as “the Room”—is recognized as an icon of the High Tech movement, its modernity aestheticized through intersecting banks of escalators and a soaring twelve-story atrium. Yet on closer inspection, this interior represents a less satisfactory compromise. The product of years of protracted negotiations with a three hundred-year-old institution, the Room was conceived at a moment when the concept of risk, and the foundations of the insurance market, were transformed due to environmental crises, technological innovations and global financial deregulation. This paper contends that the changing nature of risk was mitigated through complex consultations over the design of the Room, simultaneously demanding new architectural solutions, whilst preserving the institution’s spatial and object-oriented rituals and mythologies. It concludes that the new Room, and the design process underpinning it, was a mode of institutional risk management in an age of uncertainty.

摘要

今天，位于伦敦劳合社的 Richard Rogers + Partners 的承保室——被称为“房间”——被公认为高科技运动的标志，其现代性通过交叉的自动扶梯和高耸的 12 层中庭美化。然而，仔细观察，这种内饰代表了一种不太令人满意的折衷方案。与一家拥有 300 年历史的机构经过多年长期谈判的产物，The Room 的构想正值风险概念和保险市场的基础因环境危机、技术创新和全球金融危机而发生转变之际放松管制。本文认为，通过对房间设计进行复杂的协商，可以缓解不断变化的风险性质，同时要求新的建筑解决方案，同时保留该机构的空间和面向对象的仪式和神话。它得出的结论是，新房间以及支撑它的设计过程是不确定时代的机构风险管理模式。