Reliance Controls Factory |
| Hob Uid: 1341230 | |
Location :
Swindon
Stratton St. Margaret
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| Grid Ref : SU1726085590 |
| Summary : The Reliance Controls Factory was designed by Team 4, the partnership that included Norman Foster, Wendy Foster, Richard Rogers and Georgie Cheesman; with Anthony Hunt and Partners as engineer. It was designed for Reliance Controls Ltd, manufacturer of patentiometers and other precision electronic instruments. Team 4 was chosen to design the new factory in 1965 because the client - then a British firm based in Walthamstow - wanted a radical building to go with their radical relocation - from London to Swindon, where every employee was guaranteed a council house. The result was a unique combination of European design flair with American industrial technique, and it was also cheap. Reliance's heavy white-painted 12-metre welded steel frame, corrugated plastic-coated steel cladding and distinctive diagonal tubular steel bracing, enclosed 30,000 square feet of factory and administration floor space under a single flat roof for less than 115 thousand pounds. Almost windowless in appearance - only its concealed north wall was fully glazed - the factory featured underfloor heating and a standing-height under-floor service trench. It also boasted ingenious design features never before seen on industrial estates. For instance the interior strip lighting was carefully recessed into the corrugations of the underside of the roof decking to remove the need for separate reflectors. More remarkable was its sociology. There was no separate office wing for executives, all offices had to be partitioned off the same internal office space. There was also no executive dining room or separate entrance. When the company was taken over by the Americans its glazed north wall gave way to another 8,000 square feet of floor space and, as a result, the building became virtually windowless. In 1991, with growing maintenance and modernisation problems coupled with the fact that the site was now worth more than the building, the Reliance Controls building was demolished. |
More information : In the 1960s there was still a strong tradition in industrial architecture of the segregated management box and workers' shed with their overtones of 'us and them', 'clean and dirty', 'back and front'. At the Reliance Controls Factory, Team 4 sought to introduce a radical new approach. The result was a democratic pavilion where management and employees shared a single entrance and a single restaurant, a practice unheard of at the time. With the electronics industry then in its infancy, the building was regarded as a light-industrial prototype, its organisation and design implying new democratic standards in the workplace.
The building's emphasis on prefabricated metal components allowed the structure to be built in less than a year at very low cost. The structural steelwork was celebrated both inside and out, indeed the structural members were painted white to contrast with the grey, plastic-coated, corrugated-steel cladding.
Wherever possible, elements were designed to do double or even triple duty: for example, the fluorescent lighting was set within the troughs of the corrugated roof decking - a solution which meant that reflectors were unnecessary. The steel frame enclosed a single open space of 3,200 square metres, within which only the toilets, kitchen and plant room were fixed in place. Much of the rest of the accommodation could be changed at will by moving the non-structural internal partitioning. This latent flexibility paid off when the client, in a sudden production surge, was able, unaided, to increase his production area by 33 per cent.
The building was the winner of the first Financial Times Industrial Architecture Award. In its report the jury said: 'Its uncompromising simplicity and unity of general conception and detailed design create an atmosphere that is not only pervasive but notably comfortable to be in. It is refreshing to find something so beautifully direct that it looks like a lost vernacular.'
Completed in 1966, Reliance Controls was the last major project before the break-up of Team 4 and the founding of Foster Associates. The building was demolished in 1991 despite a televised local appeal for its preservation because of its originality and historical importance.(2)
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