Terry Farrell made his mark on London. All his buildings had a certain postmodernist swagger, but one of his most conspicuous (ironically, in view of its function) was the headquarters of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, on the site of the former Vauxhall pleasure gardens.
Completed in 1994, MI6 showed Farrell, who has died aged 87, in his postmodern pomp, energetically juggling historicist motifs to conjure a flamboyant, flesh-coloured fortress, replete with ziggurats and crenellations, dominating its Thames-side locale. Deyan Sudjic described MI6 as “an epitaph for the architecture of the 80s”, and its styling that which “could be interpreted equally plausibly as a Mayan temple or a piece of clanking art-deco machinery”. Others were less complimentary: “Ceaușescu Towers”, pronounced one critic.
