Crown Street Buildings – Residential Projects – Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

#streetscape

Crown Street Building is a modern reworking of Leeds’s strapping warehouse buildings, knitting together a complex triangular site – composed of two vacant sides and some retained and reworked buildings – into a comprehensive single piece. The principle gesture of the building’s most visible façade is a gentle concave sweep in deference to the Grade 1-listed Corn Exchange opposite. Three four-storey wings containing fifty-seven through-flat apartments (a transferal of the thinking that was originally developed for Raines Court’s prefabrication) sit atop a ground and basement podium of commercial and retail units. The wings wrap around a central raised courtyard off which first floor apartments are directly accessed. Above, private suspended decks lead to individual doors via a system that inverts where necessary (to create a buffer to the railway, for example). The treatment of the external elevations is robust; smooth, hard bricks emphasised by deep window reveals create a disciplined framework of masonry that holds glazing and coloured Sicilian lava slabs which graduate from yellow through green to blue.