Our building seeks to mediate both in form and function between the scale and presence of the meeting of the rivers on one side and a successful human-scale street on the other. It draws from the latent architecture of the locale, the gritty tactile materials of Dublin's docklands - the steel frame of the mill buildings and the gasometer, the sheet steel of the rusting ship hulls, the timber laths of the warehouses.

The steel frame functioning as support, yet treated as anaesthetic, as in much of Dublin's un-noticed industrial architecture takes its hue from the warm tones of the striking nearby Gasometer whose colouring allows it to maximise the feeling of warmth available from the low-slung Dublin sun. This raw steel aesthetic is expanded into the design of the complimentary street furniture. Streetlights, bus and LUAS shelters, benches, bins, bike-racks, phone-points are all designed and built using this one aesthetic intrinsic to the docklands and spread out throughout the Grand Canal Docks area, creating a unified coherent and specific visual for an identity already there, but yet to be exploited or celebrated.

This heavy steel language also ties in with street-furniture already present on and around the site - the tracks from the long-gone loading cranes, the hooks, chains, bollards and steps that punctuate the quaysides.

The use of the timber laths on the street-side again takes its inspiration from a functional aesthetic already present in the docklands. But their use is driven by the opportunity to create a sustainable environment for living, their functional flexibility allied with the double-skin they create maximising the solar-gain available from the western sun, while their busy aesthetic creates and assists the human scale of the street façade. The tower element allows the creation of a shaft-lobby that reaches high through the building creating a natural stack-ventilation system that circulates along the central corridors ventilating the entire building.

The building seeks to become a neighbourhood in itself, a generator of the anticipated docklands community, and as such the scale of the building attempts to fulfil the duality of landmark tower' and 'home'. Apartments are grouped around central courtyards / lobbies on a floor-by-floor basis. At every floor, the building steps out onto communal roof-terraces, each serving as private spaces where residents can mix in spaces of calm familiarity overlooking the city - successively vertical village greens. The street is seen as a vital part of the building and the scheme as a whole. The building appropriates the quayside without closing it off, defining and encouraging it as a serviceable, usable space. The building is conceived as a series of mini-communities expanding and uniting as they step down through the structure to finally arrive at street-level where a new square terminates the tower and greets the rest of the city, abutting and uniting with the square already present.

The hard gritty aesthetic of the docklands is softened by the use of wood, and set at an intimate scale, humanising the locale. Trees - maples, beech, poplars, hollies, cypresses, willows, suited to this windswept environment help define this space and regenerate the city air. This use of planting continues in and up - the vertical lobby is an ideal arboretum, the planting making use of and regenerating the air naturally circulating within this space. The planting continues out onto the successive roof-terraces identifying them, animating the building and uniting the scheme to link together coherently as the planting spills from the highest terrace to the street-level square. This development seeks to become, not only a landmark building but a hub of activity with restaurants, cafes, crèches, parks and office spaces to attract and convince a cross section of society to live, work and socialise here.