Dobson House

Designed and built in just 10 months, Dobson House would provide a new office to cater for the growth in work for local architects Williamson, Faulkner Brown’s and Partners in 1968.

Dobson House was the first new office building in the UK to embrace the design principles of Bureaulandschaft (landscaped offices), an informal, deep-plan approach to office layout which had been developed in Germany in the 1950s. The plan is highly flexible and has continually been adapted throughout the buildings history. The absence of internal partitions reduced the cost of the build with background noise of the mechanical ventilation absorbed by folded ceiling plane, carpeted floors, and originally screens within the workstations and planting displays.

The perimeter walls comprise dark-brown, quarter-bonded, engineering brickwork with brown-tinted, butt-jointed glazing, set back from the columns to provide shade. The building has been extended in 1980s and modernised more recently with large glazed screens and is still the primary office for Faulkner Brown Architects.

Images 1-2 courtesy of Faulkner Brown Architects
Image 3 copyright of Sheffield Hallam University, photographer Peter Fawcett