The key to designing successful tall buildings

With the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat convening at the Barbican this week, we’ve been thinking about tall buildings and what determines their success.

As we try to densify our UK towns and cities to address the housing crisis, minimise travel, and create more sustainable places, tall buildings are becoming a fact of life.

Since the NLA Tall Building Survey launched in 2014, it has shown a consistent rise in the number of towers in the pipeline for London alone, shocking the media and general public.

Tall buildings can be exciting and transformative. However, poor design often blights them, and the impacts of poor design are often felt well beyond aesthetics. In fact, the public realm is where most impacts are felt by most people, as we rarely get a glimpse inside. So, it is of vital importance that we understand the risks and work together to promote the highest quality of tall building design, from top to bottom.

In our experience, successful tall buildings do certain things very well.

The Top: Good tall buildings generally terminate with a satisfying conclusion of form or an expression of a crown. The top can be a simple and elegant termination (Hoxton Press). It might form a crown distinct from the architecture below (Kampus). It might express a different use, such as a roof garden surrounded by a wind-breaking frieze of masonry.

The Fenestration: Façade depth and deeper textures help us read architecture at height. Subtle detailing at the top of a building cannot be appreciated from ground level. Simple, bold moves tend to be more successful. Richard Seifert was a master of handsome tower fenestration (Crown Wharf).

The Form: Distinctive forms are more readily recognisable, great for wayfinding and placemaking. Even in smaller towers, form can be used in this way (Vulcan Wharf). Distinctive doesn’t have to mean expensive. Bold use of colour can have the same effect (Mapleton Crescent). The slenderness ratio is important. Towers can be elegant with a simple extruded form if the floorplate is small enough (One Undershaft, Hoxton Press). Others achieve elegance by cutting back mass as the buildings rise (Keybridge House).

The Plinth: The way a tall building meets the ground is crucial. A plinth might aid the transition to a more human street scale. Well-designed plinths provide important practical functions too, protecting the pedestrian environment from down-draughts, providing shelter, additional internal area, and active frontage. They can respond better to local architectural heritage, distinct from the tower above (Snow Hill).

The Public Realm: In appropriate locations, tall buildings can be transformative, liberating more space at ground level for a vibrant public realm. Their increased densities can help create and support exciting public destinations and commercial viability at ground level (Elephant Park).

The public are often cynical about building tall, quite rightly. But in our experience, this cynicism can be overcome with the right approach and design. However, even if designers make all the right moves during the planning process, quality can still be harmed by inappropriate procurement – a problem not limited to tall buildings! So perhaps this is a building type where we need to mandate more strongly for architect retention to maintain design continuity and safeguard quality. Perhaps a stronger Council hand in determining conditions can also play a part in dramatically improving outcomes. Perhaps all UK applications of this kind need to be subject to an appropriate design review process. Given the explosion in tall building applications across the country, the time to act is now.

Onwards and upwards!

>> Also read: Nearly 600 tall buildings queuing up in London’s high rise pipeline