Grimshaw celebrate St Botolphs progress Published on 11 February, 2010
 Grimshaw is celebrating the topping out of St Botolphs, a substantial commercial building in London's east end. The scheme, developed for Minerva plc and providing over 560,000 sq ft of lettable space, is Grimshaw’s largest in the City of London to date.
Located on an island site near Aldgate, St Botolphs is within the EC3 district of the City. It has been designed for multiple occupants with nearly half of the space already let to two tenants: insurance brokers Lockton and the law firm Clyde and Co. To provide maximum flexibility for occupation, Grimshaw’s design places the circulation and service cores at the perimeter of the floor plate leaving only the passenger lifts in a dramatic 13-storey central atrium. The balanced layout of four perimeter cores creates office space suitable for a broad range of occupiers including dealer operations on the lowest floors. The resulting large open plan floors, of up to 42,000 sq ft, can be easily divided into smaller sub tenancies.
The passenger lift system is a major innovation for a City office building and the supporting structure and access bridges are a key architectural feature of the interior. St Botolphs is the largest installation of Thyssen Krupp’s state-of-the-art TWIN lift system to date and the first in a UK office building. Two lift cars run independently in each shaft with access from two levels in a striking double height reception hall. With 16 lift cars operating in eight open “scenic” shafts, the computer coordinated movement of the cars will be visible to all users of the building.
St Botolphs’ distinctive facade is entirely bespoke. Using multiple layers of glass, the unique blue tinted glass spandrels elegantly sail past the windows below to act as solar shading.
St Botolphs will complete in the summer of 2010 and fit out for the first tenants is already underway.
Source: www.worldarchitecturenews.com
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