This project is about striking a balance between inclusivity and exclusivity in the city.

Its dual purpose therefore is to provide an outstanding landmark for Dublin while at the same time creating a facility for the city which is easily available to everybody.

The proposal takes the form of an eighteen storey residential tower with a triple height studio complex at its pinnacle. The tower in turn supports a double height cantilevered horizontal beam of entertainment uses thereby freeing the entire site to become a large covered public outdoor space. This free ground plane with its vast oversailing inhabited canopy becomes the potential forum for a large range of both organised and spontaneous events, concerts, gigs, street and performance art, cinema and multimedia events, weekend market, café and bar, walking the dog, meeting you under… This will be a unique city place at the end of the peninsula formed by the Liffey and the Grand Canal Dock.

It extends the public realm.

The base of the tower facilitates these activities with a fold down stage platform while a cinema screen can be lowered at the Liffey end. There is a café kiosk and nearby a car lift to private parking at basement level. Access to the beam is at the southern side of the tower base where a large glazed wall is raised to allow access to lifts and staircases access to the apartments is on the western side. The beam has two floors of accommodation providing bars, restaurants and night clubs in an interconnected series of large scale volumes, while its roof is a garden with glazed pavilions punching through from below.

The residential tower is clad in a twin skin of glazing, the inner layer being floor to ceiling screens with sliders while the outer is a layer of glass louvres which can be operated by the occupants to create varying degrees of enclosure dependent on climatic conditions allowing the internal spaces of the apartments to become large sheltered terraces particularly in good weather. There are three two bedroom apartments per floor although two larger units could easily be an alternative.

The U2 studio is a setback glazed volumetric arrangement which completes the tower. It has accommodation on three ascending levels which spiral round the solid form of the studio itself. There is a large private roof garden with panoramic views.

The overall geometry and form of the scheme defines the structural solution. The inclination of the tower gently provides a mass balance to the dramatic cantilever of the beam of entertainment uses. At an elemental level the basic structural components are prefabricated structural steel sub frames. These triangulated sub frames when connected together on site form the structural skeleton in the form of a vertically inclined truss for the tower and horizontal trusses for the cantilever. This extremely rigid structural solution enables the building form to be achieved. The basement carpark provides overall structural stability essentially acting as an underground foundation plinth which transfers the supersaturated forces to pile foundations.

The project is a balanced asymmetrical unique architectural and urban experience.