Albert Bridge House

Strategy

The proposals for Albert Bridge House will deliver much needed housing, a large-scale office, and extensive new public open space, to bolster the City of Manchester’s already thriving economy and street scene, while meeting Manchester’s ambitions towards becoming a prosperous, net zero carbon and climate resilient city.

The site is currently dominated by surface level car parking and is impermeable to public access. The design takes three disparate spaces (the existing Albert Bridge House, Bridge Street Car Park and Albert Bridge Gardens) and consolidates these into a new accessible public realm, framed by shops and cafés, at the base of a large-scale office building and two residential towers.

The new public realm will provide a revitalised ecological corridor, and walkable pedestrian route, along the River Irwell as part of a landscape strategy that retains existing mature trees and complements these with the planting of new trees, alongside hardscape areas, moments for play, movement corridors, and more serene quieter pockets of softscape, to contribute to a welcoming new public place for the people of Manchester.

Specificity

The residential component consists of two towers, at 49 storeys and 37 storeys, providing 800 build-to-rent homes alongside communal amenity spaces that include co-working, dining, cinema, fitness facilities, games rooms and social spaces for residents to enjoy.

The commercial building will deliver 23,760 sqm of office space; 840 sqm of accessible external amenity, and over 1,000 sqm of ground-level activated uses across the three buildings, which spill out into the public realm.

The landmark residential buildings occupy prominent positioning along the western and northern edges of the site, at two key gateway locations between Manchester and Salford - at the Albert Bridge and Trinity Bridge. The buildings are composed of octagonal forms, each with a centrally positioned core, where vertical circulation and building services can run up through the building, and the internal spaces radiate out through 360 degrees. The arrangement of each floor plate therefore offers panoramic views across Manchester, Salford, and beyond. All of the dual aspect homes have their living rooms arranged at an octagonal corner, enjoying full-height glazing from the lounge, to frame views down onto public open spaces, the cityscape and river corridor.

The appearance of the residential buildings has been carefully considered to take into account the local architecture, scale, and context within the urban setting. The facade colour palette takes inspiration from the red brick of the Manchester vernacular, evoking a sense of warmth and domesticity that complements the surrounding buildings. Each elevation is composed in a clear visual framework, with pronounced horizontal banding and vertical scalloped feature panels. The horizontal banding rhythm gradually increases in separation with height up each building, playing with optical perspectives that soften the heights of each building, while the colour palette lightens with height to further help the buildings meet the sky.

To bring a contemporary style to the facade articulation, a staggering vertical language and colour scheme has been adopted. A warm palette of rusty-red and wine-coloured tones at the lower levels progressively become lighter as each building face blends upwards into the sky. The overarching language forms a dynamic interplay of colour, movement, light and shadow. To complement the darker autumnal colours of the main facades, the recessed ground plane provides a lighter tonality using straw yellow, and light sage tones to foster a sense of calmness and serenity where the buildings meet the landscape. The base facades are designed to feel solid and protected, yet open and welcoming, with the use of cementitious materials and tactile textures, puncturated by generous areas of glazing at entrance moments, all within a recessed colonnade.

The commercial building also takes the form of an octagon in a lower height building to address the scale of urban context to the south and east. Aligned with the junction of St Mary's Parsonage and Bridge Street, the new 'best in class' office building holds a prominent address, while framing key urban spaces including Motor Square to the south. The facade for the office building is designed to be environmentally responsive, marrying control of solar gains through passive shading elements, with natural ventilation, and generous internal daylighting levels to provide an office environment that meets the needs of the modern worker.

Key features of the office building include wellness facilities, ice baths and sauna rooms, rooftop amenity terraces, a super lobby with cafe and bar, along with informal spill out and flexible work spaces to offer varied methods of working for tenants and visitors. The facade approach for the office creates an alternating rhythm of solid and glazing, articulated with vertical fins and perforated panels, and punctuated by horizontal banding, within a palette of anodised bronze metalwork. The overall facade approach and articulation evokes Manchester's industrial past, while looking firmly to the future.

The faceted octagonal forms of the family of buildings create slenderness from key viewpoints within the city, while framing urban spaces and street frontage along the ground plane. The height of the three buildings step sensitively downwards from north to south creating a layered height and townscape approach. Double-height entrances, activation, and communal spaces carve into the buildings at their base to break up each volume, and to engage with the human scale in a rhythmic approach that balances urbanity with nature. The facets formed by each octagonal face help to dissipate the wind, reducing the impacts of downwash to promote a calm and comfortable microclimate within the public realm, both within and outside the site extents, while allowing sunlight to reach the ground level spaces.

The public-realm of Albert Bridge House has been designed to contribute to a cleaner, healthier and more sustainable Manchester City Centre for residents, office workers and the wider public. The transformation of the site, which is currently dominated by car parking, will transform a site which was previously opaque to public movement, into a new place for Manchester that is characterised by its generous public open space to benefit people, urban wildlife and the local ecology.

Sustainability

The Albert Bridge House design sets ambitious targets for achieving net-zero across its whole life cycle. The designs achieve these ambitious aims through a low carbon energy strategy featuring air source heat pumps and rooftop photovoltaics. Each facade has been carefully designed to control heat losses and heat gains through consideration towards glazing ratios and passive shading elements. The design seeks to provide a ‘best in class’, future-proofed scheme to meet the aspirations of Greater Manchester’s target to be net-zero by 2038, as well as Oval Real Estate’s own Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) objectives.

The mixed-use development will contribute to sustainability in a broader sense through the provision of: a high-density and energy efficient development, a well connected city-centre scheme; minimal on-site parking and high-quality cycle facilities; high-quality accessible public realm and landscape; a new city centre office with Manchester City Centre; improvements to local biodiversity and ecology; play features throughout a permeable and explorable landscape; a tree retention strategy that complements existing retained trees with the planting of new trees and indigenous planting; sustainable urban drainage (SuDS) to contribute to the city's blue/green infrastructure; spaces for new businesses providing jobs and boosting the local economy.

By transforming a once closed-off site into an open, green and welcoming destination, Albert Bridge House will become a defining place within Manchester, enriching the lives of residents, workers and visitors alike.