The building includes flexible workspaces with a full-height perimeter glazed-façade – maximizing daylight and offering panoramic views towards historic landmarks such as World Heritage St Paul’s Cathedral, Old Bailey, St Brides and the Royal Courts of Justice. Fleet Street embeds strong environmental credentials geared to meet the benchmarks set out by Whole Life Carbon and Circular Economy principles to reduce the embodied carbon of the development.

Umbracle in Catalan means something that provides shade. Rather than creating a building plus a pergola, BIG proposes to do both in one single move for the new building of Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST). By setting the building back at ground level, BIG creates a single, generous, sheltered public plaza at the foot of BIST. On the back, it gently retracts to preserve urban continuity.

Like a seismic fault line, the architectural crusts of planet earth are lifted and mingled to form an underlying continuous space of caves and niches, lookouts and overhangs. Rather than a single perimeter delineating an interior and an exterior, the façade is conceived as a sinuous membrane meandering across the site, delineating interior spaces and exterior gardens in a seamless continuum oscillating between the city and the park.

A series of public programs simultaneously wrap the library on the outside and inside, above and below. Twisting the public program into a continuous spiraling path tracing the library on all sides, creates an architectural organization that combines the virtues of all complimenting models. Like a Möbius strip, the public programs move seamlessly from the inside to the outside and from ground to the sky providing spectacular views of the surrounding landscape and growing city skyline.

Tallinn municipality decided to consolidate its public governance and service entities into a new town hall. Located to the north of the medieval city center set within the green ring that wraps around the ancient city walls, the new town hall occupies a key position in the successful urbanization of the waterfront and offers a unique possibility of linking land and sea, old and new, public space and public institutions.