We are pleased to announce that two of our projects have been shortlisted for the RIBA Awards. Cambridge Street has been shortlisted for the RIBA North West Award and St Pauls Place has been shortlisted for the RIBA Yorkshire Award.
Cambridge Street, Manchester
The building site was a derelict horseshoe shaped plot, enclosed by a meander in the River Medlock to the Northern and Eastern boundary and contains 282 PRS apartments, with a reception and a commercial unit at street level. The accommodation is split into two opposing blocks; the lower situated at nineteen storeys above ground and the highest at twenty eight above ground. The ‘negative space’ between the adjacent Grade II listed Chorlton Mill and recent apartment building to the east seeks to extend visually into the courtyard between the two blocks. The scale of each responds to the desire for the site to act as a landmarked gateway into the city, as defined by the Terry Farrell masterplan, whilst translating the key heights of the chimney and eaves of the adjacent mill. The building utilises an in situ concrete frame with a lightweight structural framing system (SFS) external wall infill supported off the concrete slab edge. The facades are clad in a Corium brick tile cladding system fixed back to the SFS studs. White brick was selected to reference yet contrast with the surrounding urban grail of industrial mill red brick. Cores are clad in an aluminium composite panel rainscreen system. The building provides high quality, high density accommodation for sustainable city centre living close to workplaces.
3 St Paul’s Place, Sheffield
The building represents the completion of the commercial components of the Heart of the City Masterplan for the site formerly occupied in part by the 1970’s extension to the Grade I listed Town Hall. The masterplan introduced two new key pedestrian routes, one linking Arundel Gate and Norfolk Street, and the other Charles Street, St. Paul’s Place and the Winter Gardens. Conceptually, building three, which comprises 76,000ft2 Grade A office area, is conceived as a heavily articulated glazed rectangular ‘box’, sitting on a scale-defining Stanton Moor stone plinth which addresses the level change across the site. The ground floor offices provide a transition between the two elements of the stone podium and the ‘box’ with a colonnade to Charles Street and Norfolk Street. The building adopts the sectional heights of its neighbours, but significantly the offices rise 9 storeys above ground. This seeks to terminate the run of office buildings along Norfolk Street but also to establish nodal relationships with other taller buildings beyond in Union Street and within the New Retail Quarter. The core is located in the centre of the north elevation and is arranged so as to permit the column-free floor plates to be subdivided into three autonomous offices, which in turn wrap around the core, affording views towards the Town Hall and St. Paul’s Place.