Curvaceous windows animate the facades of a London apartment building by DROO and NAME Architecture
Set on a narrow street, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, amid buff brick terraces and redbrick Edwardian mansion blocks, the VI Castle Lane apartment building has a pale brick facade incorporating curvaceous glazed bay windows. Designed by Michel da Costa Gonçalves (DROO) and Nathalie Rozencwaig (NAME Architecture) the building is located in a Conservation Area and makes a contemporary response to the varying scales and architectural languages that constitute its context.
It comprises 28 flats and three townhouses, arranged in two principal volumes Â- the taller block on Castle Lane and a low-rise element on parallel Wilfred Street. Having catalogued local examples of bay and bow windows, the architects collaborated with facade consultants at Arup to develop a design for asymmetric bow windows with planar faces and tightly curved ends, which ripple like waves across the faces of the building.
The projecting windows are framed in steel, which also forms string courses in the brickwork, lending additional texture to the elevations. The protruding window forms are subtly echoed by concave curves in the brickwork of the low-rise block, making a visual connection between the two parts of the scheme.
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