One of them is One Blackfriars Road, a scheme which
[...] contains a 375 bedroom 6* hotel, 120 residential apartments and a publicly accessible sky deck. These elements are integrated into a slender, sculptural 65-storey tower and six storey podium building which frame a landscaped plaza.
Here are four images from the website. Absolutely mindblowing...
5 comments:
le duc, did you hack alberto's password by any chance?
No, though I was surprised to see this here.
This building is the latest in an architectural trend for "sculpted form" buildings -- the Gherkin is the most famous in London, but other proposals on the table include the Shard of Glass and the Walkie Talkie building (anyone remember Philip Johnson's Chippendale Clock building in New York?).
I rather like these forms, but notice how these photomontages try to minimise the visual impact of the design: the one view taken from above shows the thinnest side of the tower and, miraculously, the tower and the sky are almost the same colour (yeah, like how often is London's black sky that pale thin colour?) so the tower just seems to blend in rather than, as it actually does, dwarfing the Tate Tower.
Notice how in the one shot taken from ground level, it's carefully taken from a position where a low-level bridge actually sits on top of the tower, reducing our perceptions of its height and not making it look -- as it is -- like the tallest structure by an order of magnitude.
How clever is this stuff??
A more interesting question is the planning one: should very tall buildings appear solo, apparently randomly scattered around the city (like "a solitary stick of rhubarb" as one critic of this approach famously described it), or should they be clustered together, like in Canary Wharf, creating a focus.
In the 1960s, planning policy was for sticks of rhubarb, but they each had to be located at a major road interchange (hence Centre Point, the largest building for a long, long way around).
Blah blah... Continued on Apt 0.
Let's buy one and move.
I still think it's gorgeous...
It is very lickable. Which is my measure of a good design -- if it's so luscious you want to put it in your mouth, then you know...
Sorry, I think I ought to stop right there.
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