Service
Advisory and peer review, Architecture, Engineering, Lead design consultancy
Sector
Life, Work
Location
London, United Kingdom
Moorgate Exchange stands at the meeting point of London’s financial core and the Barbican’s residential edge, a setting defined by tension between scale, heritage, and urban infrastructure.
On this highly constrained plot, HKR crafted a workplace that transforms complexity into clarity, delivering both architectural presence and environmental performance. The design responds to sensitive sightlines, daylight requirements, and live Crossrail tunnels beneath the site, using these conditions not as limitations but as catalysts for innovation.
Its defining gesture is a stepped silhouette with landscaped terraces and an externalised circulation system, a strategy that balances efficiency, flexibility, and character. The result is a building that reimagines workplace design in the City of London: technically assured, visually distinctive, and contextually sensitive. With both BREEAM “Excellent” and LEED Platinum certification, Moorgate Exchange sets a benchmark for sustainable, high-performance office architecture in dense urban conditions.
Design Response
At once expressive and pragmatic, Moorgate Exchange exemplifies HKR’s ability to craft architecture that elevates the everyday workplace into a distinctive urban contribution. The stepped massing responds to protected view corridors and neighbouring residential daylight needs, while also unlocking panoramic views and accessible outdoor space. By externalising the secondary escape route, the design eliminates the need for a second internal core, creating generous column-free floorplates and an atrium filled with natural light. This circulation strategy threads through landscaped terraces, merging function with identity and lending the building a dynamic civic presence.
Interiors
Engineering & Expression
Architecture and structure are conceived as one. V-shaped perimeter columns shift structural loads clear of sensitive infrastructure, while a lightweight cantilever system supports the stepped terraces above. The façade combines unitised glazing with bronze-anodised fins and louvres, carefully tuned for solar control and urban expression. At street level, stone cladding grounds the building, while the triple-height lobby signals openness and arrival.
Sustainability & Performance
Sustainability is embedded throughout. Efficient spatial planning reduces operational energy, terraces support biodiversity and microclimate performance, and material strategies minimise embodied carbon. Achieving both LEED Platinum and BREEAM Excellent, the building demonstrates how technical precision and creative design can produce an office that is both resilient and refined. Moorgate Exchange illustrates how constraint, when met with innovation, can generate an architecture that is as sustainable as it is iconic.
