Critique of Jean Nouvel’s One New Change, 2010

Photo © Paul Riddle

Space and Place in the City
After the Luftwaffe had cleared the ground around, planners wanted a square to face the apse of St Paul’s, but the City permitted the classical curve of New Change Buildings. Now Nouvel has replaced it with an edgy building structured around four narrow passages. The solution is inventive and contextual – the view up Watling Street reveals Nouvel’s measured nod to the rooflines of the cathedral and cathedral school and, looking down Cheapside, Nouvel manages to highlight the beauty of the spire of St Mary-Le-Bow.

There is a lot of space in this place – 20,400 square metres of retail space on three levels and 30,700 square metres of office space on five floors above. The shops, open seven days a week, offer vitality to the City and a convenient enclave for consumers in a hurry, Monday to Friday. For tourists it offers sheltered respite all of the time. Commercially, a new shopping centre located between Tate Modern, the Millennium Bridge, St Paul’s, the Barbican and Bank has to be a winner.

So, what sort of place is it? Where the Cathedral Gardens on the south-east side of St Paul’s offer quiet outdoor space, One New Change provides compact noise. Its raison d’être is to make money – the ethos of the City – yet Nouvel has cleverly exploited the St Paul’s Heights regulations to carve a public roof terrace with hitherto unseen views of the cathedral. A mosaic disc – one of several from the old building that had to be preserved on the site – is set down on the obligatory ‘sustainable sedum roof’ alongside a ‘vitrine’ of recovered 1960s sculptures.