Architect
Alison Brooks Architects
Shed KM Architects
Developer
Urban Splash
Contractor
Urban Splash Build
Planning Authority
Liverpool City Council
Click any image for a larger view
It's a brave architect who squares up to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's Anglican Cathedral in Liverpool with a cluster of buildings of vigour, but ABA have taken on the challenge with their gateway to the Tribeca development, a comprehensive housing regeneration project won in a developer/designer competition by Urban Splash with Shed KM as masterplanners in 2003.
This is an important site. Not only is it just down the hill from Scott's commanding tower, but it frames the important intersection of Great George Street, and includes another notable Liverpool landmark, the Victorian 'Wedding Shop'. Taking their cue from both buildings, ABA have devised a craggy sandstone complex which will undoubtedly stimulate the mordant Scouse humour that christened Frederick Gibberd's Roman Catholic Cathedral 'Paddy's Wigwam'.
Above a double height commercial ground floor, 74 one, two and three-bedroom flats rise in three irregularly shaped buildings to an overall height of nine storeys. This is a high density development - 460 dwellings per hectare - but the density is offset by the large triangular park behind laid out over two stories of car parking, faced on two sides by further blocks of flats, and on the third side by family housing (see also pages 64-65).
The flats themselves are conceived as open plan spaces with flexible room uses, and generous storage space - an Urban Splash trademark. At the summit of each building the floors are stepped back to accommodate south-west facing roof terraces, forming a '21st Century Gothic' roofline. Coloured glass strips in the glazing continue the Cathedral reference.
At first sight, this is a quirky, almost wilful scheme. Yet there are sound urban design principles behind its layout. The transparency created by the group would have been totally lost had a lower, more monolithic volume been chosen, overwhelming the Wedding Shop. And the Cathedral itself does demand an exuberant response which resonates with the vitality of this great seaport.
All cities need a bravura gesture at times, and Liverpool of all places, with its terrific waterfront, the gravitas of Elmes' St Georges Hall, and the overpowering scale of the Mersey, is big-hearted enough to take this development and embrace it as its own.