Apple London - Special Ceiling

The 'deep wall' creates a zone around the facade that mediates between the twisting warped facade elements and the vertical interior walls. This create niches within the floor plans that can be used in various ways to provide privacy, variation in the spaces, and in the way light penetrates the facade. It also creates the option for areas of highly insulated wall, to offset the less thermally efficient areas of glass, and allows for areas that open to provide sheltered ventilation.

From the exterior the facade will show more depth, a variety of scale appropriate to a residential tower and yet will also provide consistent modelling that reveals and enhances the basic architectural move of the 'twist' that wouldn't be possible with a conventional thin skin facade treatment. The light is reflected within the perimeter zone in a variety of ways to provide interest and variation over the width of the facade by day and night but also consistency along its height to unify the building from distant views.

Twisted Tower (U2 Tower)
Docklands, Dublin
Building architect: BurdonCraig Dunne Henry, Dublin
Facade Engineer: Arup Facade Engineering, London
2005 -

This tower is the result of the international competition to design a focal building for the redevelopment of Dublin's dockland area. It is to combine high-rise residential apartments (a type unknown in Ireland until now), with new penthouse recording studios for U2 whose current studios are being displaced.

The architects proposed a twisted square form and wanted to explore complex ideas of transparency, translucency and reflectivity within the facade to convey a sense of depth, while still conforming to energy conservation legislation. They also wanted to fully understand all the options available to them from glazing manufacturers and Carpenter/Lowings worked with AFE to explore all the possibilities.

Because the twist of the tower produces very small out-of-plane warping within individual glazing panels, Carpenter/Lowings suggested exploring the use of warped cold-bent double-glazed units in combination with opaque and translucent areas of glazing or metal panelling, and also developed a 'deep wall' strategy for the perimeter zone of the building that opens up a range of architectural possibilities both internally and externally.