To this very day, veritable hordes of architecture students from all over the world make the trip to Ipswich in Suffolk / England. Their destination is the office building of Messrs Willis, Faber & Dumas, meanwhile referred to as the Willis Coroon, which has already become an architectural classic. This project, planned by Foster Associates, is regarded as a pioneering work in the field of office architecture/office contract jobs, and in spite of its comparatively young age of only 23 years has already been listed as one of our international cultural possessions.

In addition to this, the innovative office complex also makes an empathetic contribution to the historic centre of Ipswich town: the unusually curved facade of the building follows the irregular, historically evolved pattern of the site, and the glass casing system surrounding the complex, a pathbreaking feature when it was installed, in daytime reflects the adjacent buildings. The building is arranged around an atrium with escalators leading from the entrance area on the ground floor up to the restaurant pavilion embedded in a garden landscape on the top floor. In-between, there are two floors of open-plan offices, each of them for 600 employees.

This building was completed in May 1975, and for its construction a large number of what were then pathbreaking materials, design methods, and techniques for office planning and equipment were used, including the round-pastille norament® rubber floorcovering from Freudenberg. In connection with the comprehensive refurbishment and office expansion work now planned, for which the same floorcovering is going to be used again, responsible executives from Freudenberg Bausysteme KG spent some time in England, during which Mr Fritz, Managing Director of the British Freudenberg branch office, and Mr Rumpler of Global Sales Management had an opportunity to talk to Lord Norman Foster about this building in his London office.

Lord Norman described the significance of and influence exerted by the Willis, Faber & Dumas Building as follows:"When we are erecting an office building nowadays, we do this for development companies and end-user. That the rooms are deep, the building possesses only a few stories, that there are wide clearances between the columns and the building will be able to accommodate new information technology, all this is regarded as normal. At the time when Willis Faber was designed, this was not known, so in that sense the building was a complete break with the conventional. It possessed the requisite flexibility for new technologies which had not been developed back then. It was designed with upcoming changes in mind, and what was at the time regarded as radical and extraordinary is today accepted practice. And that of course applies to many other things nowadays too.

It was an attempt to arrive at a social focus, so as to give an enterprise that up to that point had undergone marked expansion its own corporate identity, to create a culture enabling people to meet each other moving up on escalators towards natural daylight. The building was designed to be highly energy-saving, a genuine advance. If you think back to the seventies, nobody was talking about cutting energy consumption, nobody was seriously discussing ecology. And yet, this building was ahead of its time in this regard as well. An interesting point to note is that it was awarded more prizes for energy saving and conservation than prizes for its architecture. The social and architectural dimensions were interlinked. The roof was designed as a garden landscape, which supported insulation but also featured a marked social dimension. The thought of having a garden of one's own was extremely revolutionary.

When the building was designed, there was no public swimming pool in Ipswich. So the building offered a swimming pool in the basement and a restaurant on the roof, both of which were very popular venues for social events in this region. Thus the building was a pioneering work in every respect. And for the first time, there were free-standing glass walls without metal frames. The building was thus breaking new ground in numerous regards. Many of these features are nowadays taken more or less fro granted; today you will find on one level large empty surfaces, space for the information technology needed; and of course the social component of the workplace environment is accorded much higher priority."

Lord Norman also gave reasons for his decision in favour of the norament® pastille-type rubber flooring, covering a large surface in this building. Moreover, he appreciated the unconventional cooperation with the industrial associate Freudenberg, a cooperation characterized by flexibility: "In most buildings, the entrance area is designed to make a maximum impression on the visitor. However, standards of quality become lower and lower as one progresses towards the working areas, which are normally quite concealed and out of the way. At Willis Faber, the visitor is rather more impressed by the open-plan room structure and the way of communication and integration into the building, by the interaction between people. If you try to reduce the number of materials used in order to enhance care and maintenance while simultaneously retaining quality standards, this poses a big challenge. What sort of material would be equally suitable for an entrance lobby, a generator room, for loading and warehousing facilities, the rear part of the house, and the mail room? This would have to be something very sturdy and durable, suited for utility rooms and upmarket areas alike.

So the material sought for was one meeting a wide range of requirements which normally would have necessitated many different materials. I think that with this specific selection we cover a very large area of requirements and needs. Questions of a completely different nature are the significance of colours and how to design a more cheerful working area. When you go up the escalators and reach the roof, there is a green garden. Is it possible to incorporate this green garden into the building as a whole, and could there be green carpets which repeat this theme? And is it also possible to introduce people to this theme on the ground floor by using a very special colour? Of course, the colour I'm referring to was not a constituent part of your product range, and I think that the concept of cooperation between designers and industrial firms assumed major significance in this context. For you see, sometimes industrial companies are not very flexible, not very open-minded, and what you get sounds more or less like this: "You know, these are my products, take them or leave them." In my opinion, it is much more creative for an architect or designer to work together with an industrial associate in an atmosphere of mutual trust, when the chemistry's right.

The interesting thing here is that from this cooperation this colour emerged, which is meanwhile offered in the catalogue and also used in many other buildings."

As a matter of fact, Freudenberg did christen this colour "Ipswich Green". And since that time, this colour has been a constituent part of our standard range. For example, it was later used by Sir James Sterling for the State Gallery in Stuttgart.

As we're on the subject of colours: for the office expansion and refurbishment work currently upcoming, delivery of the same hue as supplied 23 years ago was one of the customer's major stipulations. Another difficult-to-implement condition was the tile dimensions of 1,000 x 1,000 mm, previously the norament® standard tile format, which had in the meantime been changed to 1.002 x 1,002 mm. It was precisely this problem which was the focus of attention during the tour of the site and the discussions with Mr Peter Smith, the present-day Managing Director of the Administrative Services Department of Willis Coroon. During these discussions, Mr Smith was extremely gratified to learn that Freudenberg was able to deliver both the original colour and the original tile format, thus complying with the stipulations applying for the protection of historic monuments. In this context, he emphasized that the enterprise was very satisfied with the building as an office location, both in functional and visual terms, even after more than two decades.

"After 22 years, the floorcovering looks extraordinarily good. It's used in all heavy-traffic areas, here in the main reception area, in the loading facilities, outer corridors, utility rooms, boiler rooms, refrigeration-equipment rooms, and in the service areas. The swimming-pool area is currently being converted into offices, and it's very important for us to know that here we have a similar material available which fits in with the surrounding areas. So, we use your floorcovering in the main areas, and we should continue using it, not only because it has very good wear-resistant characteristics but also because everything fits in well together."

This means that Freudenberg will in all probability be represented with its norament® flooring in future as well in the "focal point of post-war modernism", which has exerted a lasting influence on all subsequent office buildings with atriums, continuous floor-to-ceiling glass casing, and complete indoor climate control.

By the way: nora® rubber floorings can also be found in further buildings planned by Lord Norman Foster, such as the neighbouring Saintsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, and the Shanghai Bank.