The project involves the design of a Department Store and a Cineplex within the redevelopment of an existing inner-city retail centre in Leicester.
Departing from the conventional opaque retail box, the department store design explores a layered transparency that will allow visual interaction between the store interiors and the city as in a net curtain. This is achieved through a double layered skin with a lace-like pattern applied to both layers. This membrane will act like a veil to the department store as well as a sun shading device to the interiors. The moiré lace not only acts as a technical device, allowing for programmatic flexibility in the interiors whilst opening them to views and natural light, but it also will resonate, with the cultural and historical context of the city as well as with the tenant's brand: John Lewis. The lace pattern draws on the rich history of Leicester City and John Lewis itself in respect to textile manufacturing and hosiery, and the large Asian population in Leicester.
In order that the glass curtain wall achieves a textile affective quality, the lace pattern is built as a combination of four basic templates that vary in density but always meet at the edges in identical ways. This allows for provision of different degrees of opacity to the interiors as well as giving an appearance of non-repetitive and seamless fabric. In order to establish synergy between the cinema and department store, the concept of fabric is extended to the Cineplex. The Cineplex is a blank envelope enclosing 12 screens with no requirement of any daylight to the interiors, except in the areas of lobbies. The enclosing skin is designed as an opaque stainless steel rain screen which is treated in mirror finish and pleated at different scales to diff use the large volume into a series of smaller reflective surfaces, animating the blank volume.
View Original