Alison Brooks completes 163-home Cadence Court in King's Cross

Alison Brooks Architects has completed Cadence Court, a 163-apartment red-brick block at the northern end of Lewis Cubitt Park in London's King's Cross. Two towers, rising to 12 and 16 storeys, mark the mixed-use building, which combines homes with commercial and social spaces around an open-air courtyard and looks south toward Heatherwick Studio's Coal Drops Yard.

The building forms part of the wider King's Cross redevelopment. Studio founder Alison Brooks said the red-brick exterior pays homage to nearby St Pancras Station, while the arched openings draw on the area's gothic architecture.

Why the two-storey arches?

Brooks conceived the openings as a "civic welcoming gesture" — and as a marker at the master plan's less familiar northern edge.

"The main concept of the project was to make a clear statement of welcome and arrival in King's Cross, but from the north end of the master plan rather than the south end, which everybody is familiar with," Brooks told Dezeen.

"The generous two-story-high arches were the first instinct to make this very civic welcoming gesture and then there's the idea of the arches creating a really animated silhouette," she added.

How is the building organised?

Cadence Court is a five-sided block with no designated front or back. Its first two floors hold 633 square metres of commercial and social spaces, including a "community living room" opening onto the courtyard at ground level. A prefabricated lift system serves the upper floors, where the 163 homes gain both courtyard and street views.

At the centre of the angular plan, a courtyard with a reflecting pool is wrapped by sheltered walkways that circulate between private and commercial programmes.

"It's a multifaceted building," Brooks said. "Each facet of the pentagon has a particular identity or address to the space that it's adjacent to."

"This idea of making a very connected space at the base of the building, even though it's a courtyard, is visually trying to connect all the sides of the plot to the city around it," she said.

"It's a place of movement and light and also a kind of special quality because of the reflecting pool," she added.

How was it built?

The studio used a Design for Manufacture and Assembly approach. It prefabricated 85 per cent of the building's components off site — meaning roughly five of every six parts arrived finished.

Rectangular and arched windows light the white-walled interiors, complemented by private balconies and communal roof terraces. Project credits list King's Cross Central Limited Partnership as client, with landscape by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan and Bradley-Hole Schoenaich, interiors by Conran & Partners, structure by Ramboll UK, services by Hoare Lea, cost by Faithful + Gould and lighting by Speirs + Major.

Cadence Court joins Google's landscraper office by BIG and Heatherwick, and a Coffey Architects office block recalling the area's industrial spaces, in the ongoing King's Cross regeneration — anchoring, in brick and arches, the district's northern gateway.