Albert Bridge House view from Clermont-Ferrand Square
From key ground-level viewpoints, the profile of the tower presents a slender appearance, limiting the visual impact of the tower and allowing sunlight to reach the lower spaces.
Amenities within the building include a lounge within the lobby, and a café which spills out to the public realm. A cycle workshop provides the facilities to fix and maintain bikes, encouraging healthy lifestyles. A double-height bouldering wall, a resident’s gym, shared dining facilities, and a cinema room have been proposed.
The appearance of the residential building has been carefully considered to take into account the context, the local architecture, the scale, and type of the building. The facade takes inspiration from the red brick of the Manchester vernacular, and evokes a warmth that complements the colour palette of the surrounding buildings. The elevation is composed of a clear visual framework, with pronounced horizontal banding and vertical glazed corners. The banding rhythm gradually increases in height, playing with optical perspectives that soften the height of the building.
To bring a contemporary edge, dynamism is added to main framework with shuffling windows and varying panel colours. The warmer rusty-red tones of the lower levels progressively become lighter as they blend upwards with the sky. Complementing green accents are used for the core cladding, to create a relationship with the neighbouring context. The base facade was designed to feel light, open and welcoming, with the use of channel glass with varying degrees of opacity.
The public-realm of Albert Bridge House has been designed to create a cleaner, healthier and more sustainable environment for residents, office workers and the wider public. The transformation of the site, which is currently dominated by car parking, will turn it into into a series of generous public spaces that will benefit people, urban wildlife and ecology.
The building alongside the revitalised ecological corridor along River Irwell
Albert Bridge House view from St Mary's Parsonage
Sustainability
The Albert Bridge House design sets ambitious targets to achieving net-zero targets across its whole life cycle, alongside promoting sustainable transport systems. 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 is expected to contribute to sustainability in a broader sense through the provision of: a high-density, well connected city-centre development; minimal on-site parking and high-quality cycle facilities; high-quality accessible public realm and landscaping; improvements to local biodiversity; the retention of existing trees and planting; and the integration of sustainable urban drainage (SuDS) to mitigate flood risk.
The design seeks to optimise biodiversity to complement the building and public-realm proposals, to ensure that the landscape and architectural proposals exist in concert within the design. The proposals retains and augments existing landscape features, including existing trees and key ecological habitats.