The sales brochure for 10 Park Drive in Canary Wharf, London E14, includes an interesting Q&A section with the architect Paul Williams of Stanton Williams. Here’s a quick excerpt:
Q: How did you approach designing a residential tower alongside some of Europe’s best-known commercial buildings?
A: We were really excited to be given the opportunity to design a significant residential building adjacent to an existing commercial environment. The tall and impressive glass and steel structures at Canary Wharf have a unique quality, and although it was important for our scheme to tie-in with that skyline, the building also needed to have a very different visual aesthetic that reflected the transition to residential. We felt there needed to be a subtle shift from the commercial to the residential area in order to create a new sense of place, a changed visual reference from the Wharfs’ working environment.
Although separated by a small stretch of water, we felt this change in character, that is a departure from metal and glass, would be important to give people a sense of arriving into a different environment, a different world you could say!
It had to be a structure that would engage on a human level and be welcoming at street level. We looked at a number of organic materials and eventually chose reconstituted stone as our primary material, which complemented and reinforced our design aim to create an elegant structure that conveys a sense of solidity and protection.
If there was one question you could ask either from the architect or the developer, what would it be?