No.6 Queen Street is a new BREEAM ‘Excellent’ office building in the heart of Leeds City Centre. Set over six floors, the design includes 47 secure basement car parking spaces and external roof terraces on the 4th and 5th floors giving excellent views of the city’s skyline.
The site is within a conservation area consisting mainly of red brick Georgian and Victorian properties. Our design for the elevation along York Place responds to this historical context with deeply modelled brickwork and punched windows. The height of the new building is visually reduced to tie in with the surrounding building levels by stepping the floor plates back at the 4th and 5th floor levels. Full height vertical recesses within the brickwork create a rhythm of smaller bays, which are similar in proportion to the Georgian neighbours.
Higher up the building the elevation steps back and as it does so the proportion of brick to glass reduces. At the fourth floor brickwork is used to create deep arches enclosing the glazing and by the fifth floor the elevations are all glass.
The Queen Street elevation has more contemporary neighbours and here a similar framework of brick piers and horizontal bands enclose only glazing with no brick infill panels. To reduce the scale, at the fourth floor the columns are reintroduced to form smaller bays with brise-soleil spanning between the brick piers to provide solar protection from the setting sun.
A strip of Portland stone layered behind the brickwork highlights the entrance area and continues, extending from underneath the brickwork to the corner of Queen Street and York Place where if forms a four storey arch supporting a full height glazed bay.