Outward Glance

Architectural company PLP Architecture recently has unveiled a masterplan and architectural design for a large complex at the heart of a metropolitan centre in the Pearl River Delta. Located at a very prominent junction within the central business district, the project comprises four buildings: The Nexus Building – a 600m office and hotel tower, The Platform for Contemporary Arts – a performing arts complex, The LZ Park Tower – a 300m office tower, The Concourse – a large scale retail and leisure facility. The Nexus Tower featured with it rather unusual configuration, claims to become a new dawn in the design of high-rise buildings.

Nexus tower
The starting point for the Nexus building is the search for an alternative to the high-rise point tower typology where a large central core is surrounded by usable space. In these kinds of buildings, the usual rich mix of internal spatial qualities: flexibility, views, and vertical movement are sacrificed to create an economy of scale of uniformly repeated floors with only minor variations in geometry in order to sculpt an external shape.

Consequently the experience of inhabitation and circulation is far from memorable since the qualities of the enclosed space are monotonous. To confront this tendency Nexus starts by looking at how architecture is occupied and lived from within, favouring the users who daily inhabit the structure. If the aim is to create a series of spaces that offer flexible conditions capable of responding to the needs of each tenant – rather than adapting office practices to the constraints of an inflexible floorplan – then the relation between core and building needs to be reformulated.

The best working environments usually have bar or slab configurations. This layout minimizes the need for artificial lighting and cooling, emphasizing instead visual and spatial connections to the surroundings. Moreover, with vertical circulation located on the perimeter, they are endlessly flexible, allowing different configurations, with open spaces of several storeys high, and vertical circulation located on the perimeter.

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Materials provided by PLP Architecture