RNE Tower by The RNE Group – aasarchitecture

Image © Ahmed Ehab AEH, Niloufar Moeinianbagheri, Razan Munier

RNE Tower is located in Quay street- water street in Manchester. It is a strategic location with new urban complexes like court of justice, Manchester college, Marriott Hotel. Being located at the edge of the river has added value to this site. The Site consists of two lands. The triangular land is surrounded by main streets, Quay street and Water Street, and the rectangular land (water front site) is surrounded by the Irwall street bridge, Manchester Marriott and Albert Hotel from the left side.

Design proposal and concept
Mixed use tall buildings cannot be treated as one bulky boxy building. The main aim was to change horizontal mixed-use block of different building functions into a vertical urbanism, which have mixture of functions, to satisfy inhabitants’ needs like live, work, learn, meet and play and create a vertical public realm. The main idea and the concept of the building, came from its site and surrounding context.

The agenda was to create more open public green spaces for the building’s users and community, with taking advantage to maximize the river view, without blocking the area, respecting the site skyline and considering low-rise buildings in the area. This resulted in shaping the form to have steeped and cascading green roofs towards the river and provided the opportunity to have more public and green spaces interacting with the waterfront and maximizing the view of the river.

Building Functions
River street tower have different building functions retail, F&B, school of arts and crafts, student accommodation, residential, fitness centre, upper park, Art galleries, street market and student conference centre which is linked to the school of art and crafts and Manchester college to use it in seminars.

Facade Design
This façade design for the school of Arts and crafts for reducing the heat gain and maintain natural day light with colourful and Artistic interior atmosphere. The façade consists of solar photovoltaic cells panels on the south west façade that faces the sun coated by a layer of coloured glass that has low light sensitivity that allows solar cells to work in vertical installations. This new solar panels also use 80 percent less silicon than traditional solar panels as it diffuses across the nanoparticles direct and concentrate the sunlight to the edges where silicon is.

Perforated ventilated Façade
Perforations takes on variety of forms and can be arranged in different ways. A perforated façade appearance changed depending on whether the inhabitant perceives from up close or far away. In perforated façade design, practical concern become linked to visual ones which makes the perforated panel acts as a functional façade Skin, Openings that allow light and air to enter are in line with the basic requirements that building envelopes must fulfil.

Perforations are especially suitable for opening the exterior wall in a controlled way, and at the same time, achieving an impressive visual effect. This Façade design for the conference centre and the offices spaces facing the south east and south west which is getting good amount of sun during the year. The ventilated façade is a coating system of the building which leaves a ventilated chamber between the coating and insulation.

It is considered as the most efficient system for resolving the building insulation and eliminating the unwanted thermal bridges and achieving excellent thermal hydrometric behaviour of the building. Perforated ventilated façade panels has many advantages as they consider as non-porous product, very light panel, they have high resistivity under traction and compression, high resistance to chemicals, high colour durability, resistance to industrial and saline environment, the panels have wide variety of textures and colours and ease of maintenance.

Perforated ventilated façade have wide range of cladding panels design that enable customize panels cutting and flexible formats as they have great flexibility and durability which can be designed of holes, geometric figures and natural pattern as the panels is manufactured by molding by means of mixture of silica, quartz and basalt with polyester resins as the panels are protected by surface shield that protect from ultraviolet rays. Source by RNE Group.