The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has named American Copper Buildings the Best Tall Building for the Americas and The Silo as the Best Tall Building for Europe in the 16th Annual CTBUH Awards Program, which was held at the 2018 Tall + Urban Innovation Conference, held May 30–31 in Chicago.
American Copper Buildings, developed by JDS Development Group and designed by SHoP Architects, is located along the East River in New York City. The dual-tower skyscraper features a copper coating on its north and south façades, which, like the nearby Statue of Liberty, will patina from a reflective russet-brown to blue-green over time. The community contains 761 apartments, ranging in size from studios to penthouses, with 20% offered below market rate.
The towers are connected by a three-story sky bridge, which features a 75-foot indoor lap pool along its length. “One of our favorite features on this project was the sky bridge. When we were designing the pool, we wanted the occupants to be able to swim from one skyscraper to the other, 300 feet in the air. Taken together with the building’s focus on sustainability and resiliency, American Copper Buildings creates this new idea of what urban living on the waterfront can be,” Gregg Pasquarelli, principal of SHoP Architects, said in a statement.
The Silo, once a decommissioned grain container in the Nordhavn district of Copenhagen, Denmark, has been remade by COBE Architects and NRE Denmark as 38 residential apartments. The silo structure has remained largely raw and untouched on the inside, with unit ceilings up to 20 feet high, while a new, galvanized-steel façade has been applied to the exterior. The 17-story building now serves as both a public attraction and a private residential space.
“For architects, one of the hardest [aspects] of working on an adaptive-reuse project like this is that you can fall in love with the original structure—which, in this case, was the old silo; this monolithic, slim, and aesthetically pleasing building. In this instance, it’s a question of how you can transform the original structure into a livable building that still contains the old soul of the silo,” said Caroline Nagel, project director at COBE, in a statement.
The Silo and American Copper Buildings were among nine projects recognized as individual award winners by CTBUH. The honors included four regional awards—for the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia and Australasia—as well as the Construction Award, Innovation Award, Urban Habitat Award, and two 10 Year Awards for performance over a period of time.
Oasia Hotel Downtown, the Best Tall Building for Asia and Australasia, was also named the Best Tall Building Worldwide.
