Manhattan Loft Gardens | SOM - Skidmore Owings & Merrill

The 42 storey Manhattan Loft Gardens tower near Stratford International Station is a gateway to the 2012 London Olympics. 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 a 34 storey residential tower above. The combination of the 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 that are integrated into the design to ensure that residents are never more than 9 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 to 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 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.