Packing them in

Chiswick Park was intended to offer "prestigious" London corporate headquarters for multinationals who didn't want to pay central London rates.

Norman Foster was brought in to design a series of cool, elegant pavilions clustered around a large water-feature on the opposite side of the dual carriageway from the rather run-down Gunnersbury Station.

I had been meaning to go there for some time (it's a bit out of the way) and finally got round to it in late April.

Alas, I'd only photographed about half of it when a security man descended and accused me of being an international terrorist, informing me that "photography is not permitted here".

So, being a grumpily perverse sort of cove, I left it a few months and then returned, to finish recording this actually rather sterile place.

The meteorologists had lied and what was supposed to be a day of "sunny intervals" turned out to be one of flat, unrelieved grey gloom. This did not help these giant office blocks to appear at their best.

The design aesthetic is curious: simple glassy pavilions are encrusted with external structures, almost in a nod back to the beginnings of the high-tech movement from which Foster and Rogers, et al, emerged (think Pompidou Centre or Lloyds of London, with all the gubbins on the outside).

Since those heady days Foster has been resolutely shovelling all that stuff behind cool glass screens, but at Chiswick it all seems to burst out into the open. The unfortunate effect is for these vaguely nautical structures to appear to be imprisoning the natives in their pavilions. I suspect the reason for their appearance on the outside of the building is nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with economics -- creating the largest possible floor plans with no interruptions, to achieve maximum lettable space.

However, in April, when the sun broke through, things did look a little better -- the brise-soleil actually looking like they had a useful purpose rather than, in the more wintry light, looking like some sort of high-tech imprisoning structure.

The anti-vandalism finishes applied to most of the external structures don't help to soften the feel of the place at all:

I'm also hoping that the chain mesh fencing is a temporary rather than a permanent feature:

But even when you put those things behind you, when you focus on the "water feature" and gardens, there is still something rather soullessly anti-human about this place.

Even the trees have been regimented into precise patterns.

Maybe this is unfair. Maybe when it's finished it will soften and humanise. But I'm not so sure: have a look at the third photo, of a pavilion under construction, the curtain walls completed but the external structure not yet added. I like that rather more than the finished articles.

The lightness of the steel structures doesn't actually help to relieve the sense of claustrophobia on this site. In fact, I think it makes it worse.

I wonder if anyone will ever create a modern, human office park?