Paul Cocksedge designs 'living staircase'


Designer to create spiral staircase with added greenery for Soho office development


Over the past few years, offices have been quietly turning green. Living walls - walls planted with living vegetation - have become popular features, and now British designer Paul Cocksedge has designed a 'living' spiral staircase for an office in London's Soho.

L1

By removing the load-bearing pillar from the centre of a traditional staircase design, Cocksedge has created a series of hidden spaces at the centre of the wooden spiral structure, each devoted to its own specific activity, such as reading, drawing or picking fresh mint for tea. Plants along the balustrade are not merely for decoration but are intended to be a working garden, each plant being tended to by individual members of the building's community.

L2

Each element of the staircase is designed to relate to the people using it, providing a dynamic centrepiece for Darling Associates-designed office development, which is owned by Resolution Property and is called Ampersand.

S3

Cocksedge says of the project: 'The Living Staircase is actually a combination of staircase and room, of movement and stillness, vertical and horizontal. At every turn there is an opportunity to stop and look, smell, read, write, talk, meet, think, and rest. If a staircase is essentially about going from A to B, there is now a whole world living and breathing in the space between the two.'

Cocksedge Studio is working in partnership with Arup to create the staircase.








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