SPARK and HLM announced as Innovation Award winners of Paddington Place Competition. The Paddington Place Mixed-Use Development has the potential to become a new key city quarter in London’s ecosystem. HLM SPARK’s proposal deliberately displays a diversity of buildings and uses rather than a mono cultural development solution.
Residences, commercial facilities, healthcare, education and other non-residential uses, are organized a new city living room that supports people of all ages using areas of the development at different times of day, this is a deliberate endeavor to create community vitality where the streetscape over a variety of the built levels is designed to energised organic, spontaneous public realm and in the spirit of London’s great streets and public spaces a little untidy.
Routes through the development provide permeability and connectivity to the surrounding urban grain and supporting city infrastructure. There are varied and surprising views towards the existing urban environment and the intermingled buildings, uses and users that will be critical to the social, economic and urban success of the Paddington Place development.
This is London townscape/streetscape design rather than arrogant city “beaux arts” planning. Paddington Place as with London’s Coin Street is a notion of positive bottom-up community planning guided by local expertise that can yield an appropriate development density to support a socially, economically and environmentally vibrant community.
Paddington Place provides an opportunity for a subtle shift in the spatial geography of London’s city planning away from isolated uses and building types towards a mixed-use urban district that is positively plugged in to city infrastructure and where the emphasis is on the quality of life and the seamless integration of commercial, education, healthcare, residential and recreation facilities in an appropriately human scale development. A model city quarter for an ever changing metropolis. Source by SPARK.
- Location: London, UK
- Architects: SPARK, HLM Architects
- Project Directors: Stephen Pimbley, Richard O’Neil, Lim Wenhui
- Project Team: Wing Wai Yun, Chanachai Panichpattanakij, Tan Yiling, Olivia Paine
- Total GFA: 77,300 sqm
- Year: 2016
- Images: Courtesy of SPARK