THE SIS BUILDING: VAUXHALL CROSS

The SIS Building

There are buildings that try to hide what they are. The SIS Building is emphatically not one of them. Designed by Terry Farrell and completed in 1994, the headquarters of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service on the south bank of the Thames at Vauxhall has become one of London's most recognisable postmodern buildings — its distinctive green-and-cream façade an homage to Art Deco that stands out even on the greyest London day.

Farrell's design drew influence from 1930s industrial modernism — Bankside and Battersea Power Stations among them — as well as Mayan and Aztec religious temples. The result is a building that accumulates nicknames the way most buildings accumulate weathering: Legoland, Babylon-on-Thames, the Ziggurat. Its numerous layers create sixty separate roof areas, and 130,000 square feet of glass and aluminium go into its construction. Critic Deyan Sudjic, reviewing it for The Guardian, described it as something that "combines high seriousness in its classical composition with a possible unwitting sense of humour" — readable equally as a Mayan temple or a piece of clanking Art Deco machinery.

Farrell has always maintained that he was never told he was designing the headquarters for MI6. The building was originally conceived as a commercial development, sold to the government mid-construction, and adapted into a fortress. The incongruity is part of what makes it so compelling — a building that announces itself grandly, while housing an organisation whose existence the government didn't officially acknowledge until the year it moved in.

Photograph by Richard Cooke, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Brief

A private collector — someone with a home full of interesting objects — wanted a substantial model of the SIS Building as a proper presentation piece. Scale was important: at approximately 50 × 50 × 50 cm, this was a commission that needed to hold its own in a room already used to being looked at.

The Making

We modelled the building in CAD, shared renders with the client, and worked through sign-off before moving to production — our usual process, which matters particularly on a building this intricate.

Master pattern used to create the rubber mould.

The main body of the model is cast in plaster. We first 3D printed a master pattern, made a mould from it, and then cast the final piece — a process that gives the white bulk of the building a weight and solidity that a straight print couldn't match, and captures the SIS Building's characteristic stepped, ziggurat silhouette cleanly. To this we added separate components for the windows: a combination of 3D-printed and metal-etched elements, finished in green to pick up the building's distinctive glazing. The layering of production methods mirrors something of the building's own layered, accumulated character.

The model sits on a white base, itself set within a deep wooden plinth with an acrylic case. The whole assembly stands on shallow feet that lift it fractionally off the surface, creating a shadow line below the base — a small detail that gives the piece a considered, gallery-like quality.

Adding the green windows.

The Delivery

The model was delivered to the client's home, where it joined a collection of pieces that clearly rewards a second look. We'll leave it at that.

Finished model.