In high-density residential towers the corners quietly cost money and often add little. James Hind of SimpsonHaugh showed how turning that constraint, together with the apartment mix a city insists on, into the generator of the building’s form produces something both lean and specific to its Manchester site.
Hind started with an economic quirk that anyone working in build-to-rent or mass residential will recognise. The corners carry an extra twenty to thirty square feet a floor that doesn’t really get charged back and doesn’t add value in the raw model, you pay for area you don’t need. Rather than absorb that, the practice lets it inform the architecture: cutting the corner away, or giving it a deliberate form and shape.
The second driver is local. Manchester asks for a particular ratio of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, not a uniform figure, but a set of minimums and maximums. SimpsonHaugh maps that requirement vertically. The centre of the floor plate, not just the core, but the inner ring of residential space around it, stays constant as the building rises, while the corner condition varies to tailor each level exactly to the brief.
Read as a stack of typical plans, the tower has a minimum position that pulls the walls in, a typical level that recurs up the building, and a maximum point where the plan grows out to its widest, and that is where the three-beds appear. The result is a plan-driven form, lean and tailored, in which the mix the city wants is what shapes the silhouette.
The same instinct scales up to the masterplan. What began as three smaller buildings on the site was reworked, through an exploratory process, into two identical pieces set either side of a landscape garden, a move made to maximise the placemaking rather than spread floor plates across the whole plot. Positioned to answer the sweep of Great Jackson Street, the two towers are conceived as two parts of a single whole, and are designed to work with the wider plan around them.
The argument underneath was that density is best handled as a design generator, not merely a number to hit: let the brief, the mix and even the awkward economics of the corner do the shaping, and the building comes out both efficient and rooted in its place.