Archives: Portfolios

Shanghai IFC (International Finance Centre) is one of the most significant new developments in the Pudong New Area, China’s most important financial and commercial center. The project – three towers, a shopping mall, and a public plaza – is a central element of Pudong’s skyline. Viewed from the Bund, Shanghai’s historic riverfront promenade, the development assumes a distinctive presence among the city’s landmarks.

The towers share a common architectural language. Starting with elegant, rectilinear forms clad in a vertically grained glass-and-stainless-steel curtain wall, the towers are sculpted by shearing off corners and edges, creating crystal-like shafts that gesture toward one another, creating a single composition from two buildings. Where the edges are sliced away, a horizontally grained interior is revealed. In height and arrangement, the two angled towers also respond to their varied urban surroundings.

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum is the new centrepiece of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the first of a multi-phase museum expansion. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the facility includes some of the largest column-free gallery spaces in the U.S. Renzo Piano’s scope of the project for the LACMA was to fuse its scattered buildings into a cohesive campus, with new public spaces, new exhibition spaces and a strong visual identity for the museum.

The second phase of the project for the LACMA was the construction of the Resnick Pavilion. Dedicated to temporary art exhibitions, the 45,000 sq ft (4,180 sq m) Resnick Pavilion was built above the museum’s underground parking, north of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM).

Maki & Associates has designed a new London headquarters for the Aga Khan Foundation, the Aga Khan Centre in Kings Cross. The Fumihiko Maki’s architecture practice cut out a series of Islamic courtyards and gardens from a ten-storey block providing offices, a library and exhibition space. The building brings the Institute of Ismaili Studies, the Aga Khan University, the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations and the Aga Khan Foundation UK together, after existing for 40 years in London at various locations, in their joint mission to open up a dialogue and understanding of Muslim cultures.

Farrells were commissioned by British Land to prepare a masterplan for the whole of the Regent’s Place estate on the Euston Road which included two office buildings – 10 & 20 Triton Street. The buildings face several listed buildings such as Holy Trinity Church, Great Portland Street station and the White House Hotel and therefore the materials and scale were sensitively considered throughout the design process to complement and reflect the existing contextual aesthetics in the street.

10 Triton Street creates a high value corner frontage for Regent’s Place and is shaped and set back on Osnaburgh Street to open up and frame a vista with Holy Trinity Church, to the new front door of 20 Triton Street, drawing the value of the Euston Road through to the heart of the new development.

The end façade of 10 Triton Street curves smoothly into an open courtyard, flooding natural light into the spacious public space. The project has a strong identity that generates excellent values in the West End of London and British Land were extremely pleased with this project throughout the whole process.

Working in collaboration with iconic Italian brand Molteni&C, Paris-based designer Joseph Dirand was tasked with creating the furniture for The Surf Club. Inspired by the Miami club’s décor, Dirand designed a series of special custom-designed travertine furniture – almost all made-to-order – that features simple and elegant lines. The designer carefully selected our Navona Travertine for his Navona Sofa, a piece of veined stone furniture that has the ability to make the surrounding space even more architectural.

Trained as an architect, Joseph Dirand is an interior designer who draws his inspiration from modernist architecture. He tackles furniture as self-standing objects. Deprived of a given context of existence or preconceived environment, each design is given a strong personality and a solemn monumentality. Dirand’s pieces hold an aura similar to that of large architecture: an affective force generated by the tension of the materials, the physical presence, the narratives they embed.

Dirand works closely with the finest craftspeople, allowing for a wide versatility in the choices of material stone, copper, stone, precious woods, and bronze – all backed-up by the insistent excellency of their implementation.

This Henry J. Lyons’ project for developer IPUT is a subtle landmark office building in the heart of Dublin’s business and cultural life. The design combines contemporary architecture with superior craftsmanship and meticulous attention to detail to produce a unique building finished to exceptionally high standards.

10 Molesworth Street is a sensitive and contemporary response to the remarkable streetscape in which it sits in the epicentre of Dublin’s Georgian and commercial core. Completed in 2018, this six-story above double-basement corner building adds a landmark office building with a heavily landscaped garden at its heart.

The site is located on the corner of Molesworth Street and South Frederick Street and forms part of the vista which terminates with Leinster House. The striking double height entrance is framed by full height, floor-to-ceiling windows and features a carefully composed texture of finely honed travertine pavements and cladding.

The One Kensington Gardens residential development in London is located on a prominent site facing Kensington Gardens, bounded by Victoria Road and De Vere Gardens. The project comprises 97 high-quality residential units and includes the internal reorganisation of the existing site and three new buildings facing Kensington Road, Victoria Road, and Canning Passage respectively. It also involves the reuse and incorporation of the nineteenth-century terraced house façades along Victoria Road and De Vere Gardens, which sit within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s De Vere Gardens Conservation Area.

At the very edge of the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, where the sea unites the new and the old continent, emerges a stone platform built in Roman Travertine as if it were sand. To materialize this elevated plane, which is the main living room of the house, Alberto Campo Baeza built a large box with 20 meters of frontage and 36 meters deep. And under those first 12 meters he excavated two floors in the solid rock to develop the whole living space.

The platform is distinguished by the presence of a panoramic pool and several slits in the floor, which form skylights for the stairs below leading outside. Strong winds that rage on this stretch of land are contrasted by three imposing walls whose only purpose is to split the air flow and guarantee the right breeze for those enjoying the panorama from the terrace or diving into the pool.

Bolonia, the ruins of the fishing factories where the Romans produced garum and built temples to their gods a handful of centuries ago, is just a stone’s throw away. In their honour Alberto Campo Baeza have built the House of the Infinite, an infinite plane facing the infinite sea.

OMA’s design for New Court is the fourth iteration of Rothschild’s London headquarters, all of them built on the increasingly dense and architecturally rich site on St. Swithin’s Lane, a narrow medieval alley in the heart of the City. The building offers the opportunity to reinstate a visual connection between St. Swithin’s Lane and St. Stephen’s Walbrook. Instead of competing as accidental neighbours, the church and New Court forms a twinned urban ensemble, an affinity reinforced by the proportional similarity of their towers.

New Court is made up of a central cube of ten efficient and flexible open-plan office floors – which facilitate views over St. Stephen’s and the surrounding City – linked to four adjoining annexes, with meeting rooms, enclosed offices, vertical circulation, reception areas, and a staff cafe and gym. The top of this central cube features a landscaped roof garden with outdoor meeting areas. This in turn is overlooked by an adjacent Sky Pavilion – a small tower with three double-height storeys peering out over the city – which houses meeting and dining rooms and a multifunctional panorama room with extraordinary and unfamiliar views across the City, including St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The new building unites all of Rothschild’s London staff in one location for the first time in decades. A reading room and space for displaying the family’s archive ground the new building in the bank’s illustrious history. Through the reconnection of two precious open spaces in the City – the courtyard of New Court and the churchyard of St. Stephen’s Walbrook – the new New Court promises to transform St. Swithin’s Lane.

This project for developer Derwent London – an elegant Travertine-clad complex of connected office blocks – draws on the urban character of the local area and retains an existing 19th Century building on Took’s Court. The 40 Chancery Lane building is located in the City of London’s ‘midtown’, on a large corner site close to Chancery Lane station. Several existing, dilapidated structures were replaced with a ‘U’-shaped series of connected office blocks, surrounding a rear courtyard.

The Bennetts Associates’ design creates a mix of new office and retail space in the City. The historic street pattern of narrow passages leading to open spaces and courts is reinforced by a landscaped courtyard with a gated entrance off Chancery Lane. Located on a prominent corner site within the Chancery Lane Conservation Area, the scheme has been designed to respect adjacent listed buildings and to acknowledge surrounding scale, materiality and key views.

40 Chancery Lane will be the new London home for globally renowned advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, which is part of the Publicis Groupe. Working closely with Saatchi & Saatchi, Jump Studios has taken the 100,000 sq. ft, seven storey blank canvas provided by this Bennetts Associates’ designed and created a bespoke and welcoming workspace that evokes the spirit of Saatchi & Saatchi as soon you enter the building.