Parcel, Bubble, Shell: The Insular Environment of Finance

Abstract This article explores how the design of an insurance brokerage for Willis Faber & Dumas by Foster Associates architects meticulously accommodate an increasingly constricted financial sphere. It analyzes links between privatization and delimitation across various scales: from material and spatial implications within the building, to its role in urban development schemes, to the intersection of domestic social and economic policies with international finance. The analysis centers on the local spatial implications of the United Kingdom’s transition in the 1970s away from a social democratic system that privileged industrial labor and manufactured goods, toward becoming an international center for the transaction of “invisibles” within a global financial market. The architects of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters described an “interiorized” architecture, with a diaphanous mirrored glass envelope maximizing views to the outside world while intensifying an inward focus. This paradigm of enclosure produced a model of internality particular to the outward expansion of capital.