One Southwark Bridge Tower

ICON-OMY
In today’s icon-omic and extravagant city of London, how can you design a tower—which its own raison d'être is being an icon—without becoming conventional? Where buildings are parametrically assembled, how can you stand out keeping the pureness of the form and still creating a new totem in the London’ skyline? Trying to answer these questions and following the inevitable client’s requests about the profit area the new building has to produce, the design of the One Southwark Bridge Tower origins from the addition of so much simple shapes that one could define them “generic” but which, through their way of reacting to the surrounding, realise a unique architecture, where a counterpoint of volumes establishes a new icon without necessarily being iconic.

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Later in the design phase, a recent proposal for Southwark Borough views background