International design studio Skidmore Owings + Merril received the ‘Best Future Building 2012’ award, for the Manhattan Loft Gardens in London, at the 9th annual Emirates Glass LEAF Awards.
The 42-storey Manhattan Loft Gardens tower near Stratford International Station is situated alongside one of London’s largest and newest international transport interchanges and adjacent to the new Olympic Park. The project delivers a wide range of residential loft-style and single-storey living spaces. The scheme also provides a 150-room, world-class hotel at the lower levels with the 34 storeys of residential tower above.
The combination of the luxury London hotel and residential uses with a shared large communal lobby, leisure facilities, swimming pool, spa facilities, meeting and conference spaces as well as a shared external roof garden that overlooks the Olympic Park encourages social diversity that reflects the local mix and promotes social interaction and a shared sense of community. This also ensures the building acts as a point of urban influence.
A unique feature of the building is the sky gardens, which are integrated into the design to ensure that residents are never more than nine storeys from an outdoor space. The three sky gardens provide a diverse range of shared gardens and open spaces that allow panoramic views over London and also create a striking profile as well as a restaurant that opens onto the lower roof garden. The 248-unit residential tower is created by a unique interweaving of single and 1.5-storey loft apartments that allow each flat to be individually designed to maximise its volumetric space, natural daylight and views.
The contemporary London building’s façade maintains a duality of transparent and solid panels in a serrated composition in glass and terracotta. The panels are aligned using a triangulated geometry in plan. From the corner aspects of the building, this panel directionality becomes most apparent – only one type of panel may be visible across an entire façade. Movement around the exterior of the building therefore gives a continual interplay between solidity and transparency. The directionality of the solid panels versus the transparent ones greatly reduces the amount of direct sunlight entering the building on certain façades.
Images courtesy of Hayes Davidson
