Computer Sciences Corporation HQ
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Stone monoliths on the line of a stone wall through the entrance and the reception area
Paul Bock (website) Download Original
Four interconnected office blocks set in a radial plan in historic woodland, built as the European, Middle Eastern and African headquarters for the Computer Sciences Corporation
The 2.6ha site is heavily wooded, visually cutting off the building from the surrounding countryside. In the four office blocks, the 16 identical floor plates house 90 or more people in flexible open-plan space.
The land rises to a low terracotta-tiled rainscreen wall, glass-canopied, with the four-storey office blocks showing above. The natural and contrived shaping of the land allows a substantial two-storeys of internal streets to sit behind this wall, dug into the ground, and provides a direct entrance level in the wall to each block and a lower servicing/provisioning level.
The building is founded on simple pad and strip footings in the Bracklesham Beds and is cut back into the hillside so the hub forms a half basement.
The hub’s grid was originally radial but became more irregular as the setting-out of the towers was tweaked to avoid several protected trees. The resulting grid is highly irregular with very little repetition, which made a flat slab the obvious choice for the podium levels. It is 350mm thick with spans of up to 10.5m.
Data
- Begun: Jul 2000
- Completed: Mar 2002
- Floor area: 24,510m2
- Sector: Office
- Total cost: £42.1M
- Tender date: May 2000
- Procurement: Traditional lump sum
- Address: Royal Pavilion, Aldershot, Hampshire, GU11 1PZ, United Kingdom
Professional Team 
- Architect: RTKL
- Project architects: Alison Paterson, Ian Burgess, Jacques Van Rhyn, Jason Threlfall, Jennifer Wendruff, Katrina Mathioudaki, Malcolm King, Mark Hutchinson, Matt Sheargold, Paul Dunn, Rob Lewis
- Client: Computer Sciences Corporation
- Quantity surveyor: Davis Langdon & Everest
- Structural engineer: Arup
- Civil engineer: Arup
- Services engineer: Flack + Kurtz
- Landscape architect: RPS Clouston
- Main contractor: John Mowlem
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