Exposed concrete flooring part of intentionally incomplete building

A recently constructed office building in Greenwich, London is deliberately designed to look incomplete, with exposed concrete floor plates.

The C1 building, designed by Architecture 00, is located in Greenwich’s Design District. The director of Architecture 00, Lynton Pepper, said:

“For me, the most exciting time is when a big development is under construction when it is all concrete frames. It has a sense of potential – this could be this. As soon as you clad it, it becomes: this is that.”

The C1 building looks in a state of incomplete development, leaving the viewer to imagine the building’s potential. The concrete flooring is exposed with no cladding or filling. There are three floors of offices and exposed decks with metal mesh to prevent people from falling off them.

The architects and their clients wanted the building to be environmentally friendly, so the concrete used in the building includes a high level of waste material in order to reduce embodied carbon. It has high thermal mass levels and is long-lasting.

Concrete flooring in offices is usually either finished to colour it or floor coverings are installed over it to add aesthetic appeal, but Architecture 00 sees the raw concrete of the office floors in the C1 building as an intrinsic part of the design.

To add to its eco credentials, the building uses few materials and not many bonded ones, meaning most of the materials in C1 can be recycled in the future.