Our initial investigations for this Design Excellence invited competition, looked deeper at the many types of people who will live within the newly conceived Green Square town centre. This emphasis of designing from the inside out offered us opportunities to uncover quite specific apartment configurations and allowed us to interrogate the massing of the building from an understanding of how each of the proposal’s different qualities; various orientations, locations, aspects and apartment typologies could be paired in order to suit to each individual.
Externally, this proposal intends to express the building as a clustering of individuals and the spaces they occupy whilst also striking a fine balance between the identification of the relatively small individual spaces and the coherence of the buildings as a whole – a unified community. We therefore proposed an interlocking assemblage of building communities with an emphasis on better achieving efficiencies in daylight and ventilation penetration into the floor plates through the creation of secondary facades. These secondary facades capture light and air whilst affording the spaces which front them additional layer of privacy.
The ground plane aims to respect and enhance the urban plan for the area. Articulated within the podium levels are a sequence of smaller objects which contain spaces supporting the needs of the residents above. Dividing the podium from the apartments above is a “green line” containing rooftop terraces and communal, shared facilities for the residents.
