A triple height entrance lobby will welcome visitors to a world-class hotel, two restaurants, three sky gardens and a 248 unit residential tower, all with stunning views over Olympic Park. These are some of the key features offered in the newly unveiled plan for the 42-storey Manhattan Loft Gardens in London, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). It is planned to be built near the Stratford International Station – the gateway to the 2012 London Olympics. Completion is scheduled for 2014.
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Located alongside one of London’s largest and newest international transport interchanges, the 135 meter tower will include a mix of single-height flats, double-height lofts and triple-height penthouses. Tenants will never be more than nine storeys away from an outdoor space, as three sky gardens are strategically integrated throughout the tower.
The combination of the seven-storey hotel and thirty-four-story residential tower includes 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.
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. Therefore, movement around the exterior of the building 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.
