Huntingdon Estate: New Twisting Green Roofed Tower for London's East End

A former industrial site in London’s East End will be getting an uplifting transformation as a twisting commercial, residential and cultural high rise designed by Amanda Levete Architects.  Located in Shoreditch, an area that has itself been changing over the past few years, the new building, called the Huntingdon Estate, will utilize natural light to illuminate its interior.  Attracting new retail and residential opportunities, the green roofed tower will symbolize the invigorating change the area is undergoing. 

Huntingdon’s base will have various sized retail spaces.  In an attempt to attract independent retailers instead of chain stores, the Huntingdon will offer capped rents – posing an incredible opportunity for local businesses to thrive.  A pedestrian market and gallery are also planned to help enrich the cultural heritage of the East End area. 

The twisting residential tower, steps from the Shoreditch tube station, is a myriad of glass and zinc, with various textures and finishes that are cohesive with the architectural surroundings in the area.  Responding to solar conditions, the facets of the façade let in optimal daylight, while the twists and turns also minimize solar gain.  The tower’s roof will be covered with a resident accessible green park, which not only provides a private respite, but also heightens the tower’s energy efficiency. 

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lazyreaderMay 18, 2011 at 8:06 am

In theory, urban renewal is relatively simple.  By incurring debt to pay for public improvements within a specific “plan area”, it is expected that property values will increase due to private investments that would not otherwise occur.  This new value is called “increment” or “excess value”.  The property taxes from this increase in value is then given to the urban renewal agency to pay off the debt.  Revenue generated in this manner is referred to as “tax increment financing” (TIF) or “division of tax revenue”.  If there is no increase in assessed value, the urban renewal agency does not collect any revenue. 

We know for a fact urban-renewal planning in the 1950s and 1960s is what displaced more than a million, mostly black, low-income families from their homes and turned some inner city neighborhoods into bombed-out landscapes we saw in those documentaries. 

Planners make housing unaffordable to force more people to live in multifamily housing or in homes on tiny lots.  They allowed congestion to increase to near–gridlock levels to force more people to ride the region’s expensive rail transit lines.  They diverted billions of dollars of taxes from schools, fire, public health, and other essential services to subsidize the construction of transit and high–density housing projects.  Those high costs have not produced the utopia planners promised.  Far from curbing sprawl, high housing prices led tens of thousands of families to move away.  This is what happened to Portland.  This tower is to be built on industrial land thus avoiding the dilemma.  Still think wisely about your city. 

lazyreaderMay 17, 2011 at 2:26 pm

Even if your in New York or London………….or outside major cities are having more and more serious concerns about highrises.  In other cities like Boston and Baltimore, in working class neighborhoods are worried about their homes in light of new construction.  Residents are not very impressed by the architecture; future tenants might be.  Portland, Oregon is good example of that.  What they’ve done is make laws prohibiting single family housing.  They leased land and subsidized developers to build condos in the downtown area.  Now they have apartments that sell below market rates and surprise, surprise, they’re not selling the way they thought.  Now they have a surplus of condos and apartments they cant sell and a shortage of single family housing that people want.  There’s a demographic shift in Portland.  Fewer and fewer families are inhabiting the city.  So much so, that Portland has actually closed down many schools because there are fewer children.  The result is more and more single people and young childless couples are moving to the city and it’ll be years before they have children.  Portland will suffer from what is called a “Youth Gap”.