One Ruskin Square

Likened to a ‘refurbishment in new build form’, the building showcases exposed services, an exoskeleton frame, fair-faced concrete cores and an industrial aesthetic. The building is expressed as an external structural frame to the east, west and south. Encapsulated between the frames is a unitised envelope created from a series of fully glazed and solid cladding panels.

Roughly wedge-shaped in plan, flaring out towards its north end, the building lies at the back of the site, with its long side directly abutting the railway line. What could have been a confronting slab is visually split into two sections via a break in the building’s exoskeleton and the separation between the two rooftop pavilions that contain the plant. In terms of the exterior articulation, the steel exoskeleton is the most distinctive element, giving it a post-industrial feel.

The north elevation features a fully glazed façade, taking advantage of the orientation and views towards Canary Wharf and the immediate Ruskin Square masterplan. A ‘hands-on’ approach has been taken throughout the build of the project, enabling a high degree of control over the exposed services and intricate structural connections and co-ordination. 


The external mega-frame and the secondary grid originate as a response to the guidelines defined in the design code for the Ruskin Square Masterplan and acknowledges the diagram/grid of the adjacent scheme by AHMM, which was the first to be built. This structural strategy minimises the number of columns within the office plate, which, on a typical floor, achieves a much higher than average 87 per cent net-to-gross efficiency. As a result, the lettable area is significantly increased and the internal space becomes more fluid and flexible, while providing uninterrupted panoramic views of Ruskin Square and beyond.

The unitised curtain wall provides floor-to-ceiling windows and integrated insulated aluminium composite wall and spandrel panels carefully set out in co-ordination with the external frame to achieve the required thermal performance and solar protection to each elevation.