The ziggurats of MI6 headquarters in London appeared in several James Bond films as the headquarters of the fictional 00 agency. Terry Farrell, who recently passed away, enjoyed this cinematic pairing of architecture and pop culture.
“Ceausescu’s Towers”
Completed in 1994, MI6 showed Farrell, who has just died at the age of 87, in his postmodern grandeur, energetically combining historical motifs to create a flamboyant, flesh-colored fortress, complete with ziggurats and battlements, dominating the Thames.
British writer Deyan Sudjic described MI6 as “an epitaph for 1980s architecture” and its style as “something that could be interpreted equally plausibly as a Mayan temple or a piece of noisy Art Deco machinery.”
Others were less flattering: “Ceausescu’s Towers,” declared one critic.
City and Barbican Connection
The MI6 building has appeared in several James Bond films as the headquarters of the fictional 00 agency, which was attacked by various villains and ultimately destroyed in the 2015 epic Spectre.
Farrell certainly enjoyed this cinematic pairing of architecture and pop culture. His buildings were staged, always ready for close-up.
Further down the Thames there was even more Art Deco with the equally impressive Embankment Place (1990), an office complex that hangs over Charing Cross railway station, reminiscent of a colossal Wurlitzer organ emerging from the cavity of a 1930s cinema.
The trio of major London projects was completed by Alban Gate (1987), which replaced a run-down 1960s office building on the London Wall with a tower of heroic proportions linking the City to the Barbican.
Wrapped in horizontal bands of glass and pink granite, it formed a counterpoint to the candy-striped facades of the Barbican’s more discreet modernist surroundings.
Coincided with the rise of postmodernism
Farrell also designed the nerve centre of the TV-am building (1983), repurposing a former canal-side car showroom in Camden Town to house the new era of British morning television, finishing the project with cheerful decorative elements in the shape of giant yellow and blue egg cartons – long after TV-am closed, one of them even appeared on the reality show Antiques Roadshow.
Initially working with Nicholas Grimshaw before setting up his own practice in 1980, Farrell’s rise coincided with the rise of postmodernism, catalysed by the polemical views of architectural theorist Charles Jencks.
His three-year collaboration with Jencks on what would become Cosmic House was seminal. Jencks first approached Farrell in 1978 to remodel a Victorian townhouse in Holland Park, London, and over time the project became a “built manifesto” and model of postmodernism, adorned with layers of metaphor and symbolism, both esoteric and whimsical.
Now listed as a Grade I building, it was the first post-war house to achieve this distinction.
Cheap decorations?
Some critics dismissed Farrell’s ostentatiously decorative buildings as mere cheap decorations, but beneath his genial exterior he was always extremely serious, trying to make architecture more communicative and inspiring at a time when modernism seemed to have finally run its course.
This recipe proved successful, and by the early 1990s his firm had rapidly expanded from a small studio to an international enterprise, with offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai, to take advantage of the architectural and economic liberalization brought about by the Chinese building boom.
Farrell first visited Hong Kong in 1964 on a travel grant, and China had always been close to his heart. The firm’s initial foray into East Asia came as a result of winning an international competition for the Peak Tower in Hong Kong in 1997. The tower’s semicircular profile quickly became a local landmark, even appearing for a time on the Hong Kong $20 note.
Subsequent projects in the region include the 442-metre-high KK100 skyscraper in Shenzhen (2012), which was then the tallest building designed by a British architect.
He lived above the shop
He was also perhaps the only architect to have given his name to a train – the ‘Sir Terry Farrell’, a 222 series steam locomotive, operating on the East Coast Main Line between King’s Cross and Hull, in recognition of Farrell’s design for The Deep, Hull’s giant aquarium, which opened in 2002.
Farrell’s London office was housed in a former aircraft factory near Edgware Road, which during the war had built Spitfire aircraft.
His art deco style was a curiously appropriate synthesis of decoration and industry, and for more than 20 years, Farrell lived above the shop in an airy and richly decorated penthouse.
An “urban room”
Towards the end of his career, Farrell returned to Newcastle, where he had grown up and studied architecture. Well-versed in the city’s multi-layered history and striking topography, he enriched it with the Centre for Life and master plans for the University and Quayside (he was also a talented urban designer).
More recently, he helped fund the Farrell Centre, located in Newcastle’s Victorian Claremont Buildings, which were renovated by two local architectural firms.
His idea was that every city should have an “urban room” where people could learn more about the forces that shape architecture and urban design.
This project represented Farrell’s belief in the importance of connecting directly with the public. For him, architecture was not simply the creation of monuments – although over time he had created quite a few of them – but how it fit into the broader popular and social culture.
