Out of the Box
Birmingham’s industrial heritage of heavy industry metalworking and fine hand-crafted jewellery provided the inspiration for the exterior of The Cube.
Set on a glazed plinth, the building acts as a protective metal box assembled from tessellated, glistening components, which gives way to a glassy, twisting courtyard. The 23-storey building, designed by Make, is located on central Birmingham’s last prime canalside development site. The scheme comprises a broad mix of uses including offices, apartments, retail units, restaurants, a car park, boutique hotel, spa facilities plus the city’s first rooftop restaurant. The twisting geometry of the courtyard creates 35 different types of apartment, ranging from high-level three bedroom duplexes to smaller ‘crash pads’, providing homes for all demographics. Many of the apartments have large terraces overlooking the canal. The residential space is divided according to tenancy. One half of the building contains 151 ‘buy to let’ homes, purchased primarily as investments, while the other half contains 93 ‘buy to live’ units, designed for owner occupation. The two sets of homes are accessed via separate circulation cores, located on opposite sides of the building. Homes provide open and flexible space, featuring sliding walls, picture windows and recessed doors. The scheme boasts a number of passive features to optimise its environmental efficiency, such as airtight, insulated cladding panels and varied ratios of solid-to-glass according to the direction of each façade. The provision of centralised plant across all of the building’s uses ensures both cost and environmental efficiencies, and the plant supplies underfloor heating to the apartments.
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