Amanda Levete
- Site : www.ala.uk.com
- Adresse : 14A Brewery Road N7 9NH London
Amanda Levete CBE is a RIBA Stirling Prize winning architect and founder and principal of AL_A, an international award-winning architecture studio.
Since its formation in 2009, AL_A has refined an intuitive and strategic approach to design. Collaborating with ambitious and visionary clients, we develop designs that are conceptualised as urban projects not just buildings and projects that express the identity of an institution, a city or a nation. Recently completed projects include the Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition Road Quarter (2017) in London, the V&A’s largest building project in over 100 years; MAAT (2016), a Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, commissioned by EDP, one of the world’s foremost energy companies; Central Embassy (2017), a 1.5 million sq ft luxury shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok on the former grounds of the British Embassy; a 13-hectare media campus masterplan and a 37,700m2 headquarters building for Sky (2016) in London; and MPavilion 2015 in Melbourne.
Ongoing commissions around the world include the transformation of the flagship Galleries Lafayette department store on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris; a new centre for the cancer care charity Maggie’s in Southampton; two new buildings for Wadham College at the University of Oxford; the renovation and expansion of Paisley Museum; The Courtyard, a series of community mixed-use developments on 39 sites across Moscow; and the Monte St Angelo subway station in Naples.
For over a decade, Levete was a trustee of both leading social innovation centre the Young Foundation and the influential arts organisation Artangel. She is a regular radio and TV broadcaster, writes for a number of publications including the New Statesman and Prospect and lectures throughout the world. She is a Visiting Professor and formerly a MArch tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. In 2017 Levete was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday honours list and made a CBE for services to architecture and in 2018, was awarded the Jane Drew Prize.
Levete trained at the Architectural Association and worked for Richard Rogers before joining Future Systems as a partner in 1989, where she realised ground-breaking buildings including the Media Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground and Selfridges department store in Birmingham.
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Central Embassy
Central Embassy brings a distinguishing new silhouette in the city, one that opens out both to the street and the skyline, and extends an invitation to the people of Bangkok and the world beyond.
Located within the former gardens of the British Embassy, along Ploenchit Road, Bangkok’s primary commercial artery, the 1.5 million sq ft mixed use project merges a seven storey luxury retail podium and a 27 storey five star Park Hyatt hotel tower into a cohesive, architectural entity.
The hotel and shopping mall are bound together using the notion of a continual looped form to give a more intuitive merging between plinth and tower and between the programmes. The continuity of the tower line appears to break down the volume of the mass of the plinth, creating a structure that is asymmetrical in all dimensions.
The openness of the form embraces the city and sets up reciprocal views, with a series of terraces outside and balconies within to see and be seen. The elevated form that rises from the podium wraps around two vertical light wells, opening up internal spaces to reveal stepped terraces, and dividing hotel functions: private guest-related programmes face the gardens of Lai Nert Park, while the hotel bar, reception lounge and sky terrace face the city centre.
Uniting traditional craftsmanship with digital design technologies, the design of the façade builds on Thailand’s tradition of intricate pattern making. The exterior is clad in aluminium tiles, each with two surfaces to reflect both the chaos of the city and the sky itself. Creating a dynamic pattern in response to external conditions, the distribution of tiles creates a moiré-like effect, articulated by the play of light and reflection along the varying profiles.
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