GMSquare LTD, London (2026)

24/07/2026

Exchange House at Broadgate
How do you build a 10-story office block over 18 active railway tracks without touching them? You turn the building into a bridge. 🌉🏢

Wondering around Liverpool Street Station as a tourist, I was completely lost looking at Exchange House at Broadgate. It looked less like an office building and more like a massive steel creature that had forgotten where it was going.

As a structural engineer, my confusion turned into pure admiration:
👉 The building only touches the ground on 5% of its footprint (resting on just 4 pairs of concrete legs).
👉 It suspends 10 floors of office space from 4 giant parabolic steel arches.
👉 The elevator shafts, fire stairs, and main lobby are literally hanging in mid-air.
👉 It was built in 1990 without stopping a single train below it!

It’s one of those rare moments where a radical engineering solution becomes iconic architecture.

Shoutout to the genius team at SOM, Bovis, and everyone involved in pulled off this bit of "British engineering madness."
Structural Engineers Srinivasa 'Hal' Iyengar, • William F. Baker (later engineer of the Burj Khalifa), and Robert C. Sinn

What’s your favourite piece of structural engineering in London? Let me know below! 👇

(Photos & structural details linked in the first comment!)

Finally, I should apologise for reproducing several structural drawings and photographs that are not my own work. I felt they deserved to be shared, and I do so only out of genuine admiration for the remarkable people whose imagination—and courage—made this extraordinary building possible.

22/07/2026

👀 Scorton’s Kiplin Hall 👀
👉 https://medium.com/.../scortons-kiplin-hall-066b94731936
Driving through North Yorkshire, I ignored Waze (as one does) and followed a mysterious brown sign pointing into nowhere.
Suddenly: Kiplin Hall — a stunning Jacobean house with gardens, orchards, a lake, and 400 years of stories.
Highlights of this accidental adventure:
🏰The house appears in the Domesday Book (1086).
✝️ Its owner, George Calvert, led a double life in a delicate religious environment: a disguised Catholic surviving in an Anglican Court
🌅 His son later founded Maryland. Yes, that Maryland, USA.
🤴👑 Inside: Nelson’s HMS Victory chair and a fragment of Charles I’s ex*****on block.
🧐3D scans recently found hidden voids and sealed corridors.
🚣‍♂️The lake? A flooded gravel quarry that paid to save the estate.
🧞‍♀️ Bridget Talbot, the last owner, invented the waterproof torch for life‑jackets and saved the house from demolition.
England never stops surprising me.
You take a wrong turn and end up in a place that helped shape two countries.
If you ever see a brown sign in the middle of nowhere — follow it.

11/07/2026

Stairway to Heaven at 264 King’s Road, Chelsea Fire Station? Or simply fit for purpose?

🤔🚒Having visited the King’s Road since the mid-1970s, I’ve watched this borough completely mutate. The patchouli-scented 60s hippies and safety-pinned 70s punks shopping for Che Guevara t-shirts have been thoroughly evicted by 21st-century ultra-posh snobbery. Today, it’s a pristine shopping conveyor belt terminating at Sloane Square.
But as tourists and locals drift down the pavement—hypnotised by luxury branding and Botox clinics—look up at number 264. Rising abruptly is a raw, jagged, open-frame concrete staircase climbing straight into the sky. It looks like a literal, mid-air "Stairway to Heaven."

London Planning Saga or a Modernist Blunder?

The first thought that strikes any rational passerby is that someone simply ran out of cash mid-build. Given London’s history of municipal planning disasters, a half-finished building is entirely on-brand. Did the builder just walk off the job?If you know London’s emergency architecture, it looks a bit like the iconic 1895 brick tower at nearby Fulham Fire Station. But the Victorians built those to hang up and dry canvas hoses so they wouldn't rot. Chelsea opened in 1965, long after fire brigades switched to synthetic, rot-proof hoses. So why the giant concrete corkscrew?

The "Helter-Skelter" Reality

🎪Despite looking like an incomplete construction site, this piece of unvarnished Brutalism is completely "fit for purpose." It’s a cantilevered spine spiral staircase designed as an open-air training torture device. The lack of walls is intentional, letting high-pressure water and smoke escape so the crew doesn't asphyxiate during drills. While wealthy shoppers are downstairs agonising over designer handbags, firefighters are sweating through heavy kit, sprinting up a concrete spine that goes nowhere, training to rescue people from London’s rising skyline.
It’s a stubborn monument to civic utility, a rotating street-art canvas, and a brilliant middle finger to the sanitisation of the neighbourhood. Next time you’re strolling towards Peter Jones, skip the shop windows. Look up at number 264, appreciate the raw geometry of the Helter-Skelter, and salute London's finest running up a staircase to nowhere.

🫡👉 Read the full piece below and let me know: Have you ever noticed this bizarre London landmark?

https://medium.com/.info/stairway-to-heaven-at-264-kings-road-chelsea-fire-station-or-simply-fit-for-purpose-020ebfa89c7d

27/06/2026

VENEZUELA DOUBLET EARTHQUAKES
Over 200 buildings collapsed, almost 300 with severe damage, in Venezuela.

What can two earthquakes 37 seconds apart (a double), both over 7 on the seismic scale, do to a city by the sea in Venezuela? Check this 3D map by Rodolfo Franco made from Data by Microsoft AI for Good Lab....
https://lnkd.in/emJJgEtf

or this of Venezuela, adjusted by https://x.com/mariangelli

https://lnkd.in/e5CCj3Vz

Credit to the Photographers, whose names I don't know, please accept any apologies and thanks for permitting me to show a bit of the disgrace that's happening now in Venezuela

03/06/2026

🏗️ OLYMPIA LONDON: A £1.3B Redevelopment Saga… with a Side of Drama?
👇👇👇👇
https://medium.com/.info/olympia-london-a-redevelopment-saga-with-a-side-of-drama-0e312d22a8e6

🤔Can you force a Victorian iron-and-glass exhibition space to become a luxury 21st-century lifestyle hub? That is the £1.3 billion question being answered right now in West London!
🇬🇧If you walk past Kensington Olympia today, you’ll see a massive transformation underway. Originally opened in 1886 as the National Agricultural Hall, Olympia was built to manage massive crowds. It was a classic case of Victorian “logistics before aesthetics”—built for scale rather than beauty, functioning almost as a spiritual clone of the Crystal Palace.
Now, it’s being completely reborn as a year-round, 365-day urban ecosystem.
🧱 What’s on the Blueprint?🎭
A 1,500+ seat theatre (London's largest new theatre since 1976!)
🎸 A 4,000-capacity music venue (operated by AEG Presents)
🏨 Two Hotels (Hyatt Regency + citizenM)💻 550k sq ft of creative and digital office space
🍽️ 30+ Restaurants, bars, public routes, and open-air rooftops
🌳 A new Senior School and a 2.5-acre public park
🏗️ Moving From Iron Spans to the Experience Economy. As someone who loves tracking the teams behind major landmarks, Olympia’s timeline is a fascinating mix of creators. Huge credit must go to the massive modern team executing this engineering feat, including developers Yoo Capital and Deutsche Finance International, lead designers Heatherwick Studio and SPPARC, main contractor Laing O'Rourke, and engineering powerhouses like Robert Bird Group, CampbellReith, Desco, Crown House Technologies, BJF Group, Eckersley O'Callaghan, Olsson Fire, OFR Consultants, Vanguardia, and Buro Happold.
⚠️ The Passer-by Perspective & Local Drama
Of course, no major London project escapes a bit of local friction! 😅 Neighbours have battled over late-night alcohol licensing, traffic management on congested public roads is a logistical jigsaw puzzle, and there’s a running joke that the site is turning into a theme park for corporate events and influencers. As the local saying goes: “A building designed for cows and agriculture now hosts AI conferences and fashion weeks.”
As a Grade II and Grade II* listed asset, does the exterior live up to its heritage? Even near completion, the facade feels like a collision of a million different forms and materials. When the lateral sun hits the south facade, the volumes appear jarringly irregular.
Would it have been architecturally superior to demolish everything except the historic arches to allow a uniform, contemporary identity to express itself?
While the architectural debate will likely continue for years, immense applause must go to the daring developers, visionary designers, and the incredible site labour force and traders bringing this to life. What do you think of the new design? Do you prefer uniform modern architecture, or do you like preserving historic facades even if it creates a massive contrast? Let me know in the comments! 👇Cheers to the next chapter of London's skyline! 🥂

24/05/2026

Fulham Fire Station - Half Machine - Half Dwelling

24/05/2026

🔥FULHAM FIRE STATION — Half Engine House, Half Family House🔥

Most people walk past Fulham Fire Station without noticing it.

Which is slightly unfair, because this building has been quietly doing the same job for around 130 years.

The current station opened in 1896, but its story starts much earlier.

After the Great Fire of London in 1666, fire protection gradually became not only a public necessity but also an insurance problem — insurers discovered that preventing fires was generally cheaper than paying for them afterwards. London eventually moved from private brigades to a public fire service, and by the late Victorian period, fire stations began appearing across the city.

Fulham received this one.

And being Victorian, they naturally decided that a place for storing hoses and horses should resemble a small civic palace.

👉Look carefully, and you start noticing things:
• the red brick and stone details
• the tall chimneys
• the corner turrets
• the octagonal tower
• the huge arches for the engines

Originally, this was not only a workplace.

Inside lived:
– 12 married firemen
– 6 single firemen
– 1 officer
– 1 coachman
– 4 horses
– and the fire engines.

Imagine having dinner with your family upstairs, hearing the alarm, and running downstairs to leave within minutes.

The station, adapted from horses to motor engines in 1913, became Grade II listed in 1990, and was heavily refurbished in 1994 (there’s a plaque on the façade).

My favourite detail is the tower.

People assume it existed to watch for fires, but it was to be seen, and drying canvas hoses
By the 1890s, London already had telegraph systems — the tower may have been almost as much about being seen as seeing.

Classic Victorian logic:
If public infrastructure exists, it ought to look important.

Around it, everything changed — shops, football crowds, pubs, traffic, property prices.

But Fulham Fire Station still does the job it was built for. Let's take care of wrongful refurbishments, and cherish the most precious, the Firefighters and the whole Brigade.

And in London, that may be rarer than we think.

Next time you pass it, look up.

https://medium.com/.info/victorian-fulham-fire-station-where-firefighters-did-not-commute-they-lived-there-c24d164bf88c

22/05/2026

✅Monumental Mischief at Kew! Moore's Sculptures delight us ✅
Henry Moore has officially invaded the glorious landscapes of Kew Gardens — and honestly, it feels like the gardens were landscaped around his sculptures. Everything flows so naturally you’d think Moore and Kew had been plotting this collaboration for decades.
🌳But behind this balance?🌳
A LOT of planning, curatorial chess, engineering wizardry, and a heroic team of people who deserve applause:
👉Kew Gardens and its stunning landscape stage
👉Henry Moore Foundation — the sculptural masterminds
👉Shirley Sherwood Gallery — intimate works, drawings, maquettes
👉Engineers (my favourite group, obviously)
👉Riggers, conservators, arborists, soil scientists, art‑handlers, volunteers… the quiet army behind the bronze
Behind the scenes?
☑️Staff jokingly called it “the placement wars” — horticulture protecting roots older than most countries, while the Moore Foundation pushed for dramatic sightlines and “Moore in the wild” energy.
☑️And then there was the Temperate House panic — moving monumental bronzes into a Victorian glasshouse. One staff member described it as “the great heart‑rate spike of 2026.”
☑️Sotheby’s support raised a few eyebrows (“When’s the next auction?”)
☑️ Wakehurst is hosting More Moore — sibling rivalry activated
☑️ The children’s drawing pencils ran out in week one
This exhibition is more than art in a garden — it’s a meeting of engineering, landscape, sculpture, and public joy. Moore would have loved it. Thanks for the Exhibition
☑️ Naughty Wishes: maybe we will see some Chillida or Rafael Barrios pieces running around Kew, upps just a thought

06/05/2026

Excellent design and craftsmanship, or is it craftwomanship?

06/05/2026

How about this prize winner? proud of her Works, a splendid designer, a Resilient architect, an entrepreneur, and now a craftswoman...Well Done!!

More in https://competition.adesignaward.com/ada-winner-design.php?ID=176307

GMSquare LTD

24/07/2026

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