TOUR LANTERNE

ABIJAN, COTE D'IVOIRE - ON HOLD 2024
The mixed-use tower is conceived as a vertical urban ecosystem, stacking complementary programs into a single architectural figure while allowing each function to retain a distinct identity. The building brings together a commercial base, office floors, residential units, and a rooftop restaurant, creating a continuous gradient from public to private uses and from ground-level urban life to panoramic city views. At its base, the tower opens to the city through a porous and highly animated commercial plinth. Retail, food and beverage outlets, and coworking spaces are organized across a series of planted slabs that step and overlap vertically. These levels are interconnected by external staircases and carved voids, enhancing visual and physical permeability throughout the base. Conceived as elevated streets, this layered ground condition extends the public realm upward, encouraging movement, interaction, and informal gathering while blurring the boundary between interior and exterior spaces. Rising above the commercial base, the office volume is expressed as detached planes of glass curtain walls emphasizing flexibility and openness. This fragmented envelope mediates between the dynamic public base below and the more intimate Read More

The mixed-use tower is conceived as a vertical urban ecosystem, stacking complementary programs into a single architectural figure while allowing each function to retain a distinct identity. The building brings together a commercial base, office floors, residential units, and a rooftop restaurant, creating a continuous gradient from public to private uses and from ground-level urban life to panoramic city views.

At its base, the tower opens to the city through a porous and highly animated commercial plinth. Retail, food and beverage outlets, and coworking spaces are organized across a series of planted slabs that step and overlap vertically. These levels are interconnected by external staircases and carved voids, enhancing visual and physical permeability throughout the base. Conceived as elevated streets, this layered ground condition extends the public realm upward, encouraging movement, interaction, and informal gathering while blurring the boundary between interior and exterior spaces.

Rising above the commercial base, the office volume is expressed as detached planes of glass curtain walls emphasizing flexibility and openness. This fragmented envelope mediates between the dynamic public base below and the more intimate residential program above.

The residential portion of the tower is conceived as a robust concrete skeleton that accommodates a variety of unit typologies. Within this structural frame, protruding wooden volumes articulate kitchens and bathroom boxes, introducing warmth, texture, and scale to the façade. This interplay between the solidity of concrete and the tactility of wood creates a legible domestic expression, distinguishing the residential levels while maintaining coherence within the overall vertical composition.

Crowning the tower is a rooftop restaurant conceived as a transparent pavilion, offering uninterrupted panoramic views of the city. This lightweight volume is sheltered by a dramatic cantilevering steel roof. The underside of this roof is treated as a backlit, large-scale mosaic print designed to be perceived from afar, transforming the tower into an urban landmark. Visible at the city scale, this luminous canopy gives the project its name and completes the building’s narrative as a layered, expressive, and iconic vertical destination.

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