NatWest Media Centre

The objective of the design was to respect and savour the essential nature of Lord's while bringing to it a building that heralded the coming millennium and provided the most elegant and stateoftheart media centre in the world. It captured the public imagination with its form and function, transforming a generic brief into an elegant solution, made possible by the marriage of conceptual with technical inventiveness. The Media Centre at Lord's is one of the most innovative buildings of the twentieth century. The first allaluminium, semimonocoque building in the world, it represents a breakthrough, not just in the creation of a new threedimensional aesthetic, but in its method of construction. This building was built and fitted out not by the construction industry but a boatyard, using the very latest advances in boat building technology. The building is designed to house 250 of the world's media during international cricket matches. It is the place from which the media broadcast their message while images of the building itself are then seen on millions of televisions around the world. It is both the medium and the message.