A landscaped business park by a motorway: glass office pavilions round a lake, a headquarters with its services outside, laboratories round a tensile winter garden, masted sheds and plug-in units on a permanent grid of roads and services.
The business park is the Athens Charter’s zone for work, rebuilt for the age of the motorway and the computer: a precinct of offices and light industry set in landscape, reached by car, separate from housing. Stockley Park near Heathrow (from 1984, masterplanned by Arup Associates on reclaimed ground) is the British model: pavilions round a lake, car parks screened by rows of trees, and a public park and golf course beside them.
Its buildings are high-tech in the sense Archigram’s Plug-in City had foreseen: a permanent armature of roads, services and structural grid, into which standard, replaceable enclosures are plugged. Here the glass offices have deep, column-light floors with plant on the roof; a headquarters in the manner of the Centre Pompidou wears its ducts and escalator outside; laboratories flank a winter garden under a membrane on masts, as at Hopkins’s Schlumberger centre; and the sheds hang their roofs from masts, as at Foster’s Renault Centre and Rogers’s Inmos factory.
The park is a composite; no single estate had all of these buildings.