Tall-ish buildings

This is a particularly pertinent question for London, a city where there has not been a heritage of taller buildings as in North American cities like New York or Chicago. Yet building tall is the ‘new normal’ in London, says the NLA, the centre for London’s built environment. Its annual survey of the city's tall buildings records hundreds of tall buildings that have been built, are onsite or have been consented.

The conditions for each tall building will be different with issues of form, height or microclimate to consider. What happens at their feet, how they impact the life of the streets around them is crucial. Fundamentally, we are concerned with whether they are sensitive to urbanity.

Both ancient and new

Named after one of the original eight gates in the London Wall, Bishopsgate closely follows the alignment of the Roman Ermine Street – two thousand years later, still an important north-south route through the City. Now a 40-storey tower, 100 Bishopsgate, has been built along this route. While having some of the Square Mile’s largest unobstructed floorplates, it is light on its feet. Half an acre of new public spaces is created, opening up new pedestrian routes that are in keeping with the grain of the ancient City.

The project has also included a stone-faced annex embedded into the Georgian fabric of St Helen’s Place, and at the southern boundary lies St Ethelburga's, a pocket church dating from the fourteenth century.

Creating an open space

The parallelogram plan of Two Fifty One, a 41-storey residential tower, and the triangular shape of its accompanying office building derive from the particularities of their site. Their placement addresses the adjacent streets and, to the south, forms a new public space that collects five separate routes. It also frames a new entrance to the neighbouring campus of London South Bank University.

Establishing a new urban pattern

With medieval origins as an eastern gateway into the City of London, Aldgate and Whitechapel have for centuries been a place of settlement for new arrivals in London. Suffering bomb damage in the Second World War, it remained a singular gap in the city. Today as Aldgate Place, it consists of three kite-shaped residential towers, together with three lower buildings, which define a new diagonal route and re-establish the continuity of the building lines on the surrounding street pattern. Their use of brick corresponds to that found in the Whitechapel Conservation Area across the street.

Responsive and rooted

The Bow Locks in east London typifies an industrial waterside vernacular. It was once the site of the Sun Flower Mill, destroyed in an explosion forty years ago. On the same location today, new housing for the Peabody Trust carries echoes of the old mill and responds to the waterside warehouse setting in both form and tone. Rising to 13 storeys, its tallest building, has a wall of false windows anticipating its second phase of taller buildings.

Responsibility to the city

It is, ultimately, the city in which towers are participants. Cities such as Toronto are experiencing rapid development in their skylines with super-tall towers on the horizon. Our project there in Humber Bay Shores will create tall buildings as high as 71 storeys, but they have been conceived to foster a sense of identity as a family and not in isolation. Three clusters of recognisable characters sit alongside one another, each distinguishable by a different approach to materiality, colour, form and location. Yet at the same time, they will all share features such as their modular structure and their reflective tops.