‘Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It’s time to start thinking.’

White Collar Factory, on London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ is one of the most innovative office buildings of recent years, and the product of a research project which began in 2008 during the economic recession. The design aims to reinvent the nineteenth-century industrial building as a factory for the new technology-based industries of the twenty-first century. The long life, loose fit, low energy building is a blank canvas, adaptable to today’s workers and future uses that can’t yet be predicted.

This book, one of FifthMan’s Minigraphs series, follows the research project in detail, charting the collaboration between architects AHMM and their client, Derwent London, before looking in more depth at White Collar Factory itself, its making and its materials.