This is a seriously difficult task to pull off, since so much space has to be crammed on and under this landlocked site in a prime conservation area. MacCormac has had some intense battles with planners and conservationists. But now he has his planning permission. This and the BBC’s other ambitious building projects around the country - in all a £1 billion six-year programme including new BBC centres in Glasgow and Birmingham, and a £220m expansion of its White City television and admin campus in West London - were launched with a fanfare by the Corporation’s arts grandee and architecture enthusiast Alan Yentob. Work on Broadcasting House will start in September and continue through to 2007.
Sir Richard Cornelius MacCormac makes no attempt to downplay the importance of the project. This genially cherubic figure, much given to agonizing over the detail of his buildings, is best known for some of the better recent Oxbridge and Lancaster University buildings, a Japanese-influenced training college for Cable and Wireless in Coventry, the Southwark Jubilee Line underground station, and the recent Wellcome Wing extension to the Science Museum. The BBC job takes him into a different league, however. The Spitalfields office of MacCormac Jamieson and Prichard has expanded considerably to handle it. A whole large new extension is given over to just this one job. “We’ve done around 1500 drawings so far,” says MacCormac. “This is an incredibly complex scheme.”
The complexity comes in handling all the technology associated with broadcasting both radio and TV in the digital era, plus all the necessary duplicate back-up equipment. There will be 140 studios, 20,000 miles of cabling. Plus all the necessary security. This, despite the heightened alertness following the terrorist bomb at Television Centre last year, is nothing new. The original Broadcasting House by architect Val Myers, with sculpture by Eric Gill, conceals within its bulk a strong concrete “keep” of studios. Then as now, it was regarded as imperative that the BBC should not go off the air. And even though it was directly hit and badly damaged by bombs in the Second World War, it stayed on air, its gleaming white Portland stone facades daubed with black greasepaint to make it a less obvious target.
Today, however, security goes hand in hand with openness. Dyke wants the BBC to be physically open to the public. His strategy moves all the main operations of the empire to the centres of towns and cities rather than the outskirts - hence the return to importance of Broadcasting House - and invites the public in. MacCormac’s views chime in with this. As president of the Royal Institute of British Architects at the start of the 1990s, he made it his mission to throw open the doors of the RIBA’s slightly forbidding HQ in Portland Place - only a few steps from Broadcasting House and built at almost the same time - and make it a public architecture centre, complete with café and a rolling programme of exhibitions. By force of will, MacCormac made it work, arguably better than it ever has done since. Now at the BBC he has the budget and the brief to rebuild and democratize a rather more important organization.
