Southwark Over Station Development is a 17 storey hybrid steel frame and cross-laminated timber (CLT) building, positioned above Southwark Tube station in south London. The new building will retain the much-loved station entrance, ticket hall and lightwells designed by Richard MacCormac.
The office led scheme will create approximately 200,000 square feet of commercial office space above a two storey plinth providing 2,500 square feet of retail space and more than 14,000 square feet of affordable workspace for small and local businesses.
The building’s colourful facade is made up of individually coloured aluminium baguettes that blend together in ever-changing variations, creating variety and depth of colour, with each facade responding to its context: from the red brick buildings to the south, to the blues of its glazed neighbours to the east and north, and then to the greens of the tree-lined Isabella Street.
The directional glazing of the building’s undulating facade is designed to reduce solar gain, allowing each facade to directly respond to its condition, while adding an additional layer of depth and shadow created by the zig-zag form. The massing of the building mediates between the urban scale of Blackfriars Road and the more domestic scale of The Cut by cutting away the west elevation in a series of heavily planted terraces. The terracing and planting provide both privacy for neighbours and green amenity space for the building occupants
At 75m tall Southwark OSD will be one of the tallest hybrid steel frame and CLT towers in the UK, and has been designed to achieve both BREEAM Outstanding and WELL Platinum certifications.
