American structure studio Kohn Pedersen Fox has created a glass-clad skyscraper with an undulating facade and parapets on a sloped website in downtown Vancouver.
Positioned on a sloping website close to Vancouver’s waterfront, 320 Granville is a 30-storey skyscraper designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) to host workplaces within the Canadian metropolis’s city core.
The constructing, which is clad in glass with powder-coated aluminium framing, sits among the many fashionable and classical buildings of its environment. KPF needed it to additionally reply to the location’s waterside location.
“The temporary was to design an workplace constructing that will take finest benefit of a tremendous website, the place Granville comes all the way down to the Waterfront Station,” stated KPF president James von Klemperer.
“Given this location, the pure inclination was to design a constructing that will reply to the seaside atmosphere.”
The skyscraper’s relationship to the water was expressed formally in a collection of concave and convex undulations on the facade of the constructing, which give it rounded edges at its three corners, the place it conforms to the nook of the block.
Between every of the ground plates, the glass that bands the 10-foot-tall storeys got extra selection up the facade, including to the rippling impact.
“The curved type of the tower, and the waved prime parapets, mirror our thought of giving the constructing an aqueous kind,” stated von Klemperer.
“The ensuing mild reflections and scalloped shadows have the impact of breaking down the size of the tower.”
Due to town’s restrictions to take care of the traces of sight for surrounding buildings, the tower’s top was capped.
Von Klemperer stated that the type of the tower was designed to create a visible impact that will make it appear taller when seen from sure angles.
“When seen from indirect angles, the amount of the tower seems to be made up of bundled turrets, accentuating the constructing’s vertical proportions,” he continued.
At road stage, the constructing engages with the busy thoroughfare by having a recessed entry, with large columns supporting the cantilevered edges of the higher flooring, which attain out in the direction of the road.
Flanking the entry program is a collection of ground plates that work to shelter the world across the constructing from the wet Vancouver winters.
Additionally on the bottom ground is a restaurant that’s open to the general public, whereas the foyer and different floor ground packages are open to the road through the double-height glass curtain wall.
The constructing’s interiors are pared again, with stone flooring and wood battens on the ceilings of the general public areas. It additionally homes bike storage and different facilities akin to a rooftop terrace.
KPF was based in 1976 in New York. Different current initiatives by the studio embody the Scalpel skyscraper in London and an upcoming supertall skyscraper in Austin, Texas.
The images is by Ema Peter.Â
