n2 London SW1
n2, a 17 storey steel-framed mid-rise office block, forms part of a master plan on Victoria Street, London SW1, for LandSec. Immediate neighbours include the listed Victoria Palace Theatre, its new fly-tower, and the neighbouring Duke of York Public House, as well as a number of 20th century and more recent modern buildings. n2 sits in-between these structures in terms of scale and seeks to mediate in townscape terms between the very large and quite small structures that typify this part of London. When viewed from Victoria Station, n2 acts as the backdrop to and "setting of" the grade 2 listed Victoria Palace Theatre, enabling the sense of what Casabella magazine (February 2024) called a "station piazza" to appear. A pedestrian route runs East-West from Belgravia to Cardinal Place past the southern face of n2, with a series of new public spaces designed in collaboration with muf architecture/art and J+L Gibbons. A plethora of below ground constraints, including Victorian sewer and tube lines, means that the whole structure rests upon only 4, 60m deep pile foundations located towards the edges of the triangular site, with the load-bearing core sat along the western edge. The result of this configuration is a monumental steel truss encased in insitu concrete that supports the building above. Open at ground floor, the truss forms a type of modern colonnade creating an unusually porous ground plane. The project is a few hundred metres to the west of The Zig Zag Building and Kingsgate which we also designed for Landsec, and completed 2015-6. n2 will be accompanied by another Lynch Architects project, the smaller office building known as n3, which should be completed in 2028. n3 gained planning consent in July 2019, and construction commenced in 2020. The building was "Topped-Out" in May 2022, and Practical Completion was achieved in June 2023. n2 is fully let, achieving record rental levels for Victoria, and the project has been widely published to critical acclaim.
