A landmark office complex in an East Midlands city should to be listed to protect it from major changes, according to campaigners.
A number of proposals have been considered for the HMRC Castle Meadows offices in Nottingham, including creating 323 flats.
The site was built for the Inland Revenue which moved 2,000 jobs out of London to Nottingham in 1989.
Its successor HMRC is moving to new accommodation in Unity Square near the city station, leaving law firm Brown Jacobson the last remaining tenant.
Back in the spring the 9.2 acre site, which has planning for more than 300 flats, went on the market with a price tag of £36 million-plus.
The Inland Revenue offices, designed by Michael Hopkins, were the first in the 海角视频 to achieve the BREEAM Excellent award and in 1995 won the Brick Award for the best commercial and industrial building of the year, followed by various other awards.
Nottingham Civic Society, in its application to get the building Grade-II listed, says it "considers the existing buildings to be under serious threat of substantial harm and requests that they be Grade II listed as a matter of urgency”.
The civic society, English Heritage and the Royal Fine Arts Commission successfully prevented a design-and-build package for the new Inland Revenue HQ from going ahead back in the late 1980s.
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That was on the grounds that it was of poor design quality and would have a detrimental impact on the setting of the nearby Nottingham Castle.
As a result an open architectural competition was launched in 1992 and Michael Hopkins & Partners emerged as the winner.
Nottingham Civic Society's application says: "This is a unique design of national significance which was rooted in the expression of a logical construction process where carefully designed prefabricated elements were made from locally appropriate materials to be assembled on site.
"The architecture was both respectful of the rich local architectural history and yet was a technically sophisticated response to the need to reduce energy consumption in modern offices."
The application has been launched with the support of the C20 Society, which campaigns to save outstanding buildings and design that have shaped the British landscape since the early 20 thcentury,
C20 director Catherine Croft said: "This is an outstanding set of buildings, showing how one of the top practices of the day were inspired by two really significant challenges which remain crucial today – putting new large buildings into sensitive historic settings, and delivering excellent environmental performance in a sustainable way.
"This is high quality architecture in all respects and definitely deserves two-star listing."
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Both societies say it was one of the first significant office developments to embrace green issues in its design and in 1994, Michael Hopkins and his wife, Patty, received the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal.
The institute described Hopkins' work as "not only a matter of exploiting technology to build beautifully, nor simply of accommodating difficult and changing tasks in the most elegant way, but above all of capturing in stone and transmitting in bronze the finest aspirations of our age”.
A spokeswoman for Hopkins Architects told Nottinghamshire Live: "The original buildings were designed as flexible open plan offices so converting them for residential use doesn’t strike us as a straightforward or sensible exercise.
"It is not clear how the plans could be divided up to provide communal access nor is it obvious how all the varying room sizes required in residential projects could fit within the existing building and facade bays.
"In addition there is the difficult technical challenge of adapting the ventilation, fire separation and drainage to meet building regulations and housing standards.”