The café, which will be open all year round and serve the many tourists visiting one of London's main attractions, is built on Tower Wharf, between the fortress and Tower Bridge. The project was ordered by the Historic Royal Palaces charity organization.
The building of the cafe, which includes a bar, a dining room and a summer veranda, is an elongated volume, which at one end is closely attached to one of the outer walls of the Tower, and the other rests against the arch of the Tower Bridge. When designing a kind of transition from one landmark to another, the architects were obliged to create an object that would not contrast too much with the historical structures, but at the same time had a distinctly modern features.
As Tony Fretton Architects admit, they were able to solve this difficult task by choosing not famous monuments as a source of inspiration, but modern high-tech volumes on the opposite side of the Thames, in particular,
London City Hall building. The architects decided to design the new cafe in the form of several laconic parallelepipeds, as if sliding out of each other, and carefully selected palette and materials helped to tactfully fit this volume into the historical environment.
Closer to the bridge, the architects placed the covered premises of a cafe - bar and a dining room, and a summer veranda was located directly at the foot of the Tower walls. The veranda is protected from possible rains and winds with an awning and high glass railings, while the main volume is faced with wood, which the architects tinted in a light gray shade. According to the authors of the project, this, on the one hand, visually makes the new building similar to the stone walls of the fortress, and on the other hand, it continues the tradition of temporary structures made of wood that have been erected on the pier from time immemorial.
A. M.
