A Botanical Garden Lobby

The brief was to provide a contemporary lobby with a variety of amenity to support the tower tenancies above. It also needed to be a counterpoint to the newer neighbouring developments and have its own appeal and identity. The lobby needed to ‘work harder’ than it had previously where there were vast unused areas and a vacuous nature to the space.

We introduced giant glowing ‘glasshouses’ to anchor the space, supported by a division of the lobby into three zones: work, meet and eat. Each is underpinned by its primary task, the work zone is a comfortable space with a variety of soft settings for group and individual work. The meeting zone is a newly introduced Generator meeting suite, with large seminar and boardroom spaces available for booking in the building. Finally, the eat zone serves dual purpose - a grab and go space by the Commercial Bay link bridge and a more formal café to the main lobby.

This project redefines the multipurpose and adaptive reuse of the Lobby. The emphasis was on what was worth keeping and recycling before we delved into design solutions. As a transient space with heavy foot traffic from the adjacent transport terminals and connection to Commercial Bay the lobby must be both intuitive and activated. A new wind lobby access to the Albert Street elevation enables a streamlined control of the pedestrian traffic through the site. All the planting and joinery is designed to refocus the space around the rotunda, creating a dramatic central ‘green bowl’ with large planters on the ground floor to fill the void with foliage over time.

This article originally appeared in warrenandmahoney.com