Glass Needle Dumped For Dual Hotel Building

Plans for the so-called Glass Needle in Cardiff seem to have fallen by the wayside to be replaced by a proposal from Archial for a new 12-storey hotel building split into two distinct sections catering for different parts of the market with a maximum height of 45 metres.

The design has the unusual feature of having, with the exception of a modest 6-storey section aside, a five floor 150 bedroom mid-market hotel fill much of the lower levels with one design decorated with as-yet unspecified cladding, and a second 210 bedroom luxury hotel structure sitting on top.

Being eight floors tall and clad in white aluminium with slender recessed floor to ceiling windows it's got a slender vertical green wall running up six levels of it to help animate the facade. This tower section will oversail the portion of the building aimed at the lower part of the market, as well as have its own entrance section opposite Central Plaza. Here there will be four separate levels instead of the neighbouring five, and thus higher floor to ceiling heights.

This is not a classless structure as in effect the architecture translates social stratification visually into the design. Not only do the wealthy sit on the top, as they often do with tall buildings thanks to things like penthouse apartments, but they do so visually here not only with material but also with the actual mass thanks to the overhanging elements.

The differences between this and the last plans couldn't be more stark as if to compare the extravagance of boom architecture with the understatement of bust architecture. However, as before the applicant for the project is Urban Solutions who will be hoping that this time they can actually get around to building their project without further interruptions.

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