High flyer: Herzog & de Meuron’s first residential building in UK launches

Playing a game of Jenga with studio apartments and four bedroom homes, Herzog & de Meuron brings modernist values to luxury residential living at One Park Drive in Canary Wharf, the practice’s first residential UK project.

Tessellating 483 residences across 58 storeys, the architects have created a cylindrically evolving object formed of balconies, terraces and bay windows. Not far from a Ballardian fantasy, the building has been engineered using three typologies of home – Loft, Bay and Cluster – layered in alternating stepped floor plans, which allow for balconies and large bay windows for each unit (though, the architects have been sure to protect from cross views).

High-ceilinged loft style apartments with spacious terraces form the base, while visually projecting from the central barrel, smaller apartments occupy the middle belt of the building, and above, larger two to three bedroom homes fill the volume, recessing back with their terraces cut back from the form.

Each apartment will have access to views and outdoor space, carefully engineered to make sure no apartments are overlooking

Geometrically balanced yet complex in its arrangement, the form references the accumulating brickwork lattice of Herzog & de Meuron’s last London project, the deliciously angular Switch House, while the layered units and accumulating insets riff off some of London’s most iconic housing estates such as the Barbican, Alexandra Road and the Brunswick.

With sales launching in May 2017, One Park Drive is set to complete in 2018, when the high-end housing project will be fed with its refined residents as part of the first phase of Canary Wharf’s inhabitation programme – 3,300 new homes will be built in the area, a quarter of which will be affordable, with capacity for building 400 more homes.

An architectural experiment as well as a social one, Canary Wharf has enlisted a stellar list of architects to build an identity for the area which is one of the Dockland’s last remaining undeveloped expanses. Along with Herzog & de Meron, Stanton Williams Architects, Allies and Morrison, Grid Architects, KPF, Darling Associates, Patel Taylor and Wirtz International are contributing to the first phase of the urban transformation.