OST Tower

OST Tower has a curved balcony front on every floor and a podium wrapped in perforated screens. Neither is a flat surface, and linear profile is manufactured straight. That is the constraint the elevation scheme had to solve, and solving it was the job AL SHOLA ALMODEA designed, supplied and installed here.

There are three usual answers and they look quite different from the street. Segment the run into short straights and accept a faceted line. Use a flexible profile and accept a softer, less crisp edge. Or set the fitting into a recess so that the light follows the curve even though the fitting does not.

The balcony lines read as continuous warm curves from the road. Vertical runs at the corners hold the tower’s height, and the balcony lines cross them horizontally, so the elevation has a frame and a rhythm inside it rather than one or the other.

At the base the perforated screens are lit from behind. A perforated panel with light behind it stops being a surface and becomes a pattern, which is the cheapest transformation available on any facade and one of the most effective.

A curved run cannot be ordered off a drawing. The radius on a finished balcony front is never exactly the radius on the architect’s section, and on a tower it varies slightly floor to floor as tolerances accumulate. The survey has to come off the building itself, level by level, before any profile is cut.

Backlighting a perforated screen has its own rule, and it is the gap between source and panel that decides everything. Too close and each source shows as a bright spot through the perforations; too far and the pattern washes out altogether. That distance is settled on a mock-up on site, at night, before the remaining screens are wired.

Both details are far harder to correct after handover than to get right in survey. A faceted curve or a spotty screen is visible from the road for the life of the building, and neither is fixed without the access equipment coming back.