JLR Global HQ

Our design for a new building for Jaguar Land Rover in the Warwickshire countryside was designed to bring its core development functions of design, engineering and production purchasing together under one roof.

Once home to a World War II airbase, the village of Gaydon has long been a focus for research and development. This, its most recent addition, looks to the future – the new facility is now the centre for work on autonomous, electrified and shared mobility technologies to support the company’s long-term growth.

The building accommodates 3,500 staff, including the renowned Jaguar Design Studio, offices, a flexible 400-seat hall, visitor facilities, a restaurant, cafés and a range of social and meeting spaces. To create a sense of community in a building of 50,000 square metres, the design uses a sequence of horizontal planes to guide circulation and encourage collaboration between departments. A new internal street links the building to the existing structures.

The project also involved the design of Europe’s largest timber roof, which projects to shade the facades and incorporates oversailing rooflights to fill the internal street below with natural light. A steel super-grid provides the robust, flexible framework for all these different functions; its form references the triangular geometry of the original airbase runways, connecting the site’s future to its past.