Business Publications

Central focus: now near completion, this mixed-use building boldly combines three very disparate elements, shopping mall, university and office tower, to try to create an urban and social centre in the middle of sprawling suburbs

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2003

The university takes up three floors, connecting tower, podium and galleria. They are given identity with a metal cladding system into which windows are punched through a mixture of panels of titanium zinc, chemically treated stainless steel and raw titanium-a mixture that is used on some of the public parts of the interior, there combined with wood, white panels and glass. As the sun moves round the building, the mixture changes; in direct sunlight, titanium panels seem to be darker than zinc ones; the reverse is true when a face is in shadow. In counterpoint, stainless-steel panels incorporate permanent changes in colour from red to green to blue and black, depending on the length of time each piece of metal spent in the pickling bath.

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On top of everything else is the office tower, with an elongated curved plan, conventional apart from the fact that the services and vertical circulation core is offset to allow daylight into the lift lobbies and lavatories. Cladding is apparently pretty straightforward curtain walling over a gridded window pattern. In fact, the wall is a little more subtle, with fritted spandrel panels in front of aluminium-foil-covered insulation. When the sun shines, the spandrels become radiant, and in the shade, they are more or less opaque white so the tower, like the podium, changes with time and weather.

The wrapped effect is emphasized by twisting the glass wall at the north end of the plan to form what the architects call 'a warped prow' that reaches out over the street. Thom's intention in making the tower convex is, in a sense, to make it a counterpart of the concave curve of the piazza below. But the tower's shape is, of course, also intended to make it a landmark in the relentless low-level, low-density cityscape.

For me, the prow's twist is a gesture too far, though from certain angles, it does indeed draw attention to the place. Yet, though it is easy to have reservations about individual details, Central City deserves respect. It is undoubtedly a daring attempt to generate a real sense of urbanity and human focus in the spiritual desert of the amorphous North American suburb. And, unlike many attempts to create civic sense, it has been achieved largely by working within the constraints of commercial development. All architects must hope that it succeeds, for if it does, it will show that our profession has far more to offer than the role of exterior decorator to which it is so often reduced by the North American development industry. P. D.

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