The eye-catching part of this modern apartment design is the ship snout shaped. Arranged in pairs of split-level section apartments one above the other, each level entered from a mid-level access gallery.
You can see this astonishing design of Foster and Partner on brown-field site in Manchester, United Kingdom. These flats consists mostly of small one and two-bedroom apartments.
Two stepped blocks rising to seven stories mark the transition between the low-rise housing scale on Woodfield Road and the larger scale industrial units north of the canal. Each block is folded around a tall and narrow entrance courtyard, which contains all vertical circulation in the form of open stairs, lifts, and galleries that lead to the front doors of the flats.
The stepped section of the compact 60-70m2 flats provides a generous living room of one-and-a-half storey height with full-height windows and a terrace. Single-level bedrooms are arranged above and below the access gallery and face towards the courtyard.
At ground level there are single level one-bedroom apartments which are suitable for disabled and elderly users. At roof level there are larger two and three-bedroom penthouses with large south facing roof terraces. The rounded ends of the blocks cantilever out over the canal and consist of tall, single-level flats.
The aim is to achieve a high building quality through repetition and pre-fabrication. Exposed pre-cast curved concrete slabs form the ceilings of the flats and create thermal mass. They also contain short horizontal service runs in a hollow floor zone. A semi-basement garage will be constructed under the entire site to accommodate 293 cars.
