155 Queen Street Mall

The proposed upper podium façade to 155 Queen St has been conceived as a stand-alone design aimed at providing a distinct and individual urban character to a new dynamic development. The materiality and geometry employed will endow the new façade with a subtle relationship to the adjacent Wintergarden whilst remaining a clearly unique and individual addition to the streetscape.

Respect and sensitivity towards the adjacent Grand Regent heritage building façade has been in the forefront of the design and disposition of the new art screen. The art screen is at its most open and transparent at this northern end; the supporting structure has a feathered edge to avoid a vertical return and the cladding has been folded open to allow light and oblique views through the art screen to the adjacent Grand Regent heritage building facade.

The key aesthetic explored in the new art screen is the metamorphosis from the geometric to the organic. This metamorphosis describes a transition between the underlying rigor and simplicity of the pentagon grid and panels on the southern side to the progressively more organic butterfly shaped panels to the north.
The double pentagon’ or ‘bow-tie’ art screen facade panels are articulated to the south as a series of rigid geometric pentagons which gradually fold open until they are fully opened to an almost perpendicular position to the building’s façade. From this position they morph in a way similar to the referenced Escher drawings into more organic butterfly-like forms.

This motion and transformation progresses from closed at the T+G building to open from right hand side to left when viewed from the Queen Street Mall.