High rise, luxury residential development in riverside setting with bold and innovative landscape features
Broadway Malyan, the biggest residential architects in the UK, are known for pioneering and ambitious projects, they build high profile projects in Britain and abroad.
This project was a large, high-rise, luxury residential building with a inner courtyard garden. The public spaces of the building required thoughtful design and detailing, high quality materials and large bespoke, unique sculptural features.
My involvement included the design of a large decorative roof garden with imposing sculptures, fountains and dramatic lighting. Outside the building I designed a sophisticated entrance and lighting, and a unique and poetic suspended public walkway over the river to create a tranquil space close to nature in this busy city centre location.
The building's location is on a bend in the river, and a public footpath that follows the river through Manchester city centre wraps around the building. An attractive feature of the design is that for some part of its length we designed the footpath to be a suspended wooden platform hanging from the structure of the building. To follow the curve of the river around the building offers a kind of nautical experience, like being on a boat, with rustic floor decking and handrail. It also provides something rarely found in a city centre; the chance to escape the rush and concrete and take a rest in a natural place.
The enclosed roof garden includes fountains and bespoke sculptures 10 metres tall, which provided the lighting. The garden is built on a platform above the carpark and so it had to be very lightweight and carefully designed so that most of the weight was transmitted directly down the structural columns. Trees were planted in 500cm of soil but the remaining planted areas were allowed very shallow soil. Innovative materials and technical considerations were required to provide impressive plants, fountains and huge sculptures with a minimum of weight applied to the supporting columns.
For this project I coordinated meetings and tasks with technical engineers and specialists, and I contributed to a multi-disciplinary team. As Landscape Architect, I was responsible for all external spaces for this and other projects, and in larger strategic projects I helped create masterplans.
