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The UK's greatest 20th-century skyscraper has been converted from offices to apartments in a stylish repurposing by Conran and Partners that takes its cue from Richard Seifert's sublime design.
by Conran and Partners
Swiss-British architect Richard Seifert wanted the windows on Centre Point to be floor to ceiling, so that you could look down from your office desk and see what was going on in the streets below in the very heart of London without having to stand up. But the iconic 117m-high skyscraper he designed with practice partner George Marsh wasn't finished that way - in 1965, office windows always started around waist height, so spandrels were installed.
Now, the offices have been transformed into 82 apartments by Conran and Partners, with an approach that senior partner Tim Bowder-Ridger describes as 'working to the soul of the building'. In the apartments, the all-new glazing comes down low, uplifted just around 30cm from the floor. Chances are Seifert would have been pleased with that, and much else in the transformation of the most famous of his commercial practice's designs, which was Grade II listed in 1994.
The Centre Point tower is part of a complex combined with a traffic gyratory system, built when cars were more important to planners than people. Linking the tower to a big box podium beneath a block of Camden Council housing, and floating above the traffic, was an 80m-long, three-storey bridge of offices. Developer Almacantar acquired the whole site in 2010, and Rick Mather Architects (now MICA) was appointed to transform the lower volumes, including turning the bridge into a restaurant hub renamed The Link, replacing the housing with a new 10-storey, 13-unit residential block, banishing the surrounding traffic and creating a new public plaza surrounded by shops, St Giles Square. These aspects of the project are due to open later this year.
Work on the Conran and Partners plan for the 34-storey tower got underway when the whole tower disappeared > behind a wrap patterned by hip design firm Eley Kishimoto (Blueprint 340). Bowder-Ridger notes that 'the technical task of physically converting a building of this type, and the construction process this involved, posed a significant challenge.' To take one example, floors built with centimetre-scale Sixties' tolerances had...