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High-tech corporate façade for Channel Four HQ

The Channel Four TV Headquarters has become a London landmark. Its distinctive entrance is through a dramatic, concave laminated glass façade. A stepped ramp leads from the street, over a laminated glass bridge spanning a laminated glass skylight (or 'roof light') to the TV studio area below.

Modern, glitzy and streetwise. Channel Four's headquarters has a flamboyant, suspended laminated glass wall on its façade with primary structural steel elements flanking the entrance picked out in reddish brown.

Richard Rogers Partnership (RRP) Founding Partner, John Young, used the laminated glass façade to achieve maximum transparency for the building. Marcus Binney, Architecture Correspondent, remarked in The Times of London after attending the building's official opening (8 July 1994): "At the end of the day, the façade takes on an element of Chaplinesque comedy, as the staff burst out of doors at different levels to descend. As they walk around the half-landings on the stairs, they appear to rotate automatically, like the liveried footman on Fortnum and Mason's clock . . . Here (RRP) seems in a playful mood, providing panache in the gloomy purlieus of Horseferry Road."