The Business Garden is an office park development on a 2 hectare site close to the centre of Bucharest and consisting of three buildings with 52,000 sq m of office area situated over a shared plinth and basement parking zone. The raised parking level forms a landscaped plaza around which the buildings are clustered, providing a pleasant and traffic-free garden environment for workers and visitors.

Sugar House Island is in East London, approximately 1.5 km from the Stratford transport hub and directly south of the 2012 Olympic site. Planning consent was granted in 2012 for a comprehensive mixed-use redevelopment of the site to provide 1,200 residential units, 58,000 sqm of offices and workshops, a 350 bedroom hotel, bridges, and a riverside park. Following extensive remediation and the enclosure of the island within a new river wall, the project is in construction.

www.sugarhouseisland.com

The design concept uses a traditional approach to density and domestic scale, using the patterns of the site’s old yards and roads and older London itself, to introduce familiar forms, scale and spaces.

These are found in the mews lanes, the garden courts, the streets and the accent towers as well as in the public spaces of Danes Yard, Chimney Walk and the gastronomy hub to the south. All these, together with the enclosing waters and west facing park, contribute to a new neighbourhood which has the character of a river island.

Plot R5 falls within the fourth phase of the Sugar House Island masterplan and comprises 86 dwellings made up of over 40% family housing, and a corner shop. The concept for its general arrangement, like the most of the residential plots in the masterplan, is a dominant perimeter block of dual aspect apartments. The enclosed inner space made by the perimeter block is divided to form two separate and more intimate garden courts through the introduction of a residential mews down its middle. The architectural expression of the perimeter block allows for the identification of the mews, the representation of central partis in the longer perimeters and the legibility of the roof level setback storey, all within a common language of architecture and subtle shifts in colour and materials.

Plot R7 falls within the fourth phase of the Sugar House Island masterplan and comprises 82 dwellings consisting of a range of generous apartment types with a flexibly planned space allocated for a restaurant and bar at the ground floor level. The tower and linear block sit on the edge of the west side park and give definition to the western edge of the masterplan. The tower, like other vertical accents in the masterplan, marks a key position in the masterplan, in this case the end of the Chimney Walk and the entry from there to the west side park.

The floating facility at Three Mills Moorings is a lightweight structure of CLT , clad in cedar and positioned on a pontoon which adjoins the pontoons of existing canal boat residences at Three Mills Wall River in Stratford. The accommodation houses bicycles, positions for the storage of winter fuel and laundry facilities. The building was constructed off-site and erected on the pontoon within a period of only a few days at the end of 2016.

The Sugar House Lane Conservation Area was identified as the natural home of a creative cluster of businesses. The project preserves and enhances the industrial character of notable existing buildings with complementary new buildings grouped around heritage yards to provide 12,200 sq m of accommodation in total.

The modular design of the Danes Yard Tower is constructed of sustainably sourced timber arranged as a hyperboloidal structure. At night, the dynamic animation of low-energy coloured lights transforms the tower into a key landmark in East London. The immediate purpose of the tower at the time of its planning consent in 2012 was to act as a temporary symbol, heralding the regeneration of the Sugar House Island site. Well received by the Borough of Newham and its Planning Department, the investor was asked and agreed to accept a permanent approval for the structure. Now it stands as a familiar element within the complete design of Danes Yard.

Photograph by Paul Stoddart

An extensive mixed-use development in the heart of Bucharest on a 5.2 hectare site on the banks of the Dambovita River. Located adjacent to the Timpuri Noi Metro station, the development stands on the site of a former industrial facility of the same name. The completed project will provide commercial offices, a hotel and service retail units focused around a new urban plaza and a residential garden community. Phase 1 nearing completion - 50,000 sq m of class A office area and 3,000 sq m of retail space. The characteristic of the masterplan is that the commercial buildings address Splaiul Umirii and Strada Nerva Traian with the core of the site giving way to a lower residential scale.

The arrangement of the three buildings which make up the MU2 plot arises from the need to maintain the row of retained chimneys and pavilion, to recognise the scale of the buildings which preceded the new proposals and to form a separation for the residential quarter beyond from the environment of the High Street. The buildings echo the architectural partis of the existing and proposed buildings in the North East Quarter and provide a flexibility of workplace planning planning and good lighting conditions. The ins and outs of their plan arrangements, courts, passageways and entrances contribute to the informal character of the space which is Chimney Walk.

The Magdalenas Quarter at the  north east end of Antonijas Iela already had a loosely defined urban arrangement. The task for ARC-ML was to refigure this as a rational masterplan with consideration of uses, appropriate scale, external spaces and the general arrangement of the individual buildings which would make up the whole. This work was carried out as a series of individual urban and architectural studies which gave sufficient definition to the investor’s requirements for the briefing and steering of local design teams.

The project requirement was for a masterplan concept design and its development in detail, to provide a mainly residential mixed-use project. The site faces onto an inner-city waterway which lies close to the famously reconstructed historic centre of Gdansk. The design provides a repairing of the former urban pattern, with linear perimeter blocks to the streets, a raised and partly enclosed garden court and a row of more singular buildings to address the waterside. Given its generally historic location and its position within a historic conservation area, the new buildings which face the water represent a contemporary interpretation of the city’s characteristic Hanseatic warehouse forms, executed in brick and tiles. Following construction of the semi-basement the project is in construction.

An innovative land-based fish farm designed to house the large-scale production of fish from the  hatching laboratory to tank and onward to an automated processing facility. Located close to Barcelona Airport, the buildings occupy a footprint of 18 hectares on a 38 hectare site at the edge of the Parc del Llobregat. The tanks are arranged each side of the technical production spine. The environment is designed to be sustainable, low-tech and achieved by a combination of solar power and simple lightweight, reflective and self-ventilating, tented structures. Tanks clusters are separable. The water filtration and management is via a system of lagoons.

The study consists of the preparation of masterplan proposals for the former industrial site at Starolecka / Portowo and its adjacent site to the south. The site lies some 10 km further south down the River Warta from the historic centre of Poznan The site offered the opportunity to make a water course within the site by linking the existing former canal boat repair dock with the circular sump on the adjoining site. This offered the opportunity of allowing the riverside atmosphere to be brought into the site and for an artificial river island to be formed at the river frontage. Both allow a larger number of residential units to obtain a more attractive and valuable setting. This forming of the river island on the River Warta and the threading through of the water course became a central device in the concept plan.

visualization by Vastint Poland

visualization by Vastint Poland

Masterplan for the redevelopment of a redundant deep sea fishing pier on the waterfront of Gdynia, proposing a new mixed use 18.5 ha city quarter with a new city marina with its cross pier link and harbour circuit. The new urban structure takes its cue from the established city pattern and provides zoned office, commercial and residential quarters with a total area of ca 270,000m2.

A 6.6 hectare neighbourhood on the former Tetley Brewery site at the heart of the Leeds South Bank. The centrepiece of the scheme is a 2.3 hectare urban park, The new quarter provides around 15,000 sq m of active cultural and retail uses with some 85,000 sq. m of employment space, a 400 bed hotel and around 850 residential units.

www.brewerysiteleeds.com

The concept embraced and exceeded  the city’s ambition for park land  in its developing Southbank by making a linear park  which will extend the urban pattern of the city  southwards, bringing social benefit through amenity and at the same time provide the setting and character of a new urban quarter. The scale and continuity of the urban forms give definition and a sense of enclosure to the park.

ARC-ML’s Berlin studio was custom built within a Berlin courtyard on a micro-site that once housed a derelict workshop. The Atelierhaus provides 110 sq m of office and visitor accomodation.

The study involves the urbanisation of a former exclusion zone to give the city a new main frontage to the harbour and the sea. Two significant  and solitary elements of the post-communist era already sit on the site in the tall forms of the Sea Towers and the curve-fronted cinema complex. These were to be included and respected. The concept for the site was to provide its perimeters with rectilinear city blocks and courts to reflect the forms and scale of the adjacent city fabric which had been built in the 1930s. Within this orthogonal arrangement the curved form of the cinema introduces a sweeping route which, starting as an entrance position at Skwer Kościuszki, interrupts the block forms to lead to a Market Hall at the foot of the Sea Towers and to make a strong connecting way to the neighbouring Dalmor Pier masterplan. The proposed uses were mainly commercial office and residential together with two hotels, tourism functions, a market hall, a retained cinema and, below it all at basement level, car parking decks for these new uses and the visiting public.

An Edwardian terrace in the historic centre of Tunbridge Wells was reordered to accommodate a shop unit, an apartment and ARC-ML’s UK studio.

A 100 bed student residence for students at the University of Manchester. The residence building and its pavilion café lay in the environs of a Grade I listed church and were designed to complete and upgrade the church court area, lying off the Oxford Road Corridor.

This urban design study arose out of an initiative by the RIBA to examine and exhibit key aspects for improvements to the urban structure in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, the town in which ARC-ML has its studio. Received wisdom was that the town suffered from a linear arrangement which lacked cohesion. Our study took a key section of the linear arrangement, Mount Pleasant, which included the town hall in the north and the railway station in its south and set about creating a sequence of urban spaces which provided incident in the linear structure. We showed where squares should be formed or where development plots should be adjusted or where the addition of closures or new buildings would give emphasis and stages to the linear route. We also identified positions in the general area of the study in which sites presented themselves as potential development which would enhance the urban structure.  

First of all Land on the west side of the E19 motorway exit at Poortcenter Delft, with its open distribution of unrelated built forms, provides much less of an impression of a gateway to the historic city than its name would suggest. The study examines the potential for an increased development of the land plots to the north and south of the Ostpoortweg through the introduction of a more dense urban pattern to provide new commercial office space, residential blocks and related car parking facilities, and in doing this creating buildings and spaces which give the sense of entering the city.