Sixteen projects. No stage rounded up.

Multi-use hospitality building

Four hundred and twenty-four keys in seven room types, on a plot of 4 370 m² asked to carry 32 555 m² of building. That arithmetic is the whole problem: fifty-nine per cent of the site goes under the building, sixteen floors climb and two go down, and the elevations end up holding 29 000 m² of glass. The pointed-arch screen is not ornament — it is what shades that glass.

Keys

424

Room types

7

Height

71.0m

Above ground

16floors

Below ground

2floors

Plot

4 370m²

Built area

32 555m²

Site coverage

59%

Shaded glazing

29 000m²

Mixed-use building

Twenty floors and 86.5 m standing on a site of 8 550 m², with sixteen per cent of it built on. The remaining eighty-four per cent stays open ground — on a tower site that ratio is the first decision made and the hardest one to reverse.

Floors

20

Height

86.5m

Site

8 550m²

Site coverage

16%

ARTIFEX Resort

The practice's own development, and the only entry here where ARTIFEX sits on both sides of the table. Terraced villages step down the slope, standalone villas stand clear of them, a cable car takes the vertical distance, and a leisure spine ties the parts into one place rather than a collection of plots.

Administrative building

The long elevations take the sun, so the long elevations carry the screen. An arched, perforated panjara stands in front of the glass and carries the solar load rather than passing it inward — the shading is architecture here, not equipment.

HBR multifunctional complex

Offices, retail and residence on a single plot, with a planted roof terrace over them. Each use wants its own entrance, its own service route and its own hour of the day; the concept is the arrangement that lets all three share one address.

Al-Khorezmi Presidential School

An eight-hectare campus, presented at head-of-state level and approved at concept. The badge is worth reading slowly: the concept has been approved, which is a different thing from a building standing, and we will not write it as though it were the same.

Campus

8hectares

Presented

Head-of-state level

Westminster International School

The campus is planned on the tulip form, and the form survived: what stands is close to the concept that was drawn. On a campus of this size that is the fact worth reporting, because it is the one most often quietly lost between drawing and handover.

French House

Sixteen apartments with the interiors finished, not only the shell, handed over twelve months from the start. Interior finishing is where residential schedules usually go; this one stayed inside its own.

Apartments

16

Interiors

Full finishing

Delivery

12months

Koshkar-Ata Riverwalk

A river frontage drawn as one system rather than a decorated embankment. The difference shows in what actually gets designed: not a promenade laid along the water and called finished, but the whole frontage taken as a single problem.

Tashkent City — centre concept

Eighty hectares of new centre. ARTIFEX contributed to the concept, and the entry is listed at that weight and no heavier — on a project this size the difference between contributing and authoring is the whole truth of it.

Area

80hectares

Role

Concept contribution

Luxury Waterfront Street

Retail and public space along a neglected watercourse — the kind of line a city has usually already written off. The concept treats the water as the reason for the street rather than something the street happens to pass.

Leisure Park

Ten hectares of retail and entertainment, planned as one ground rather than a row of separate attractions.

Area

10hectares

Covered Beach

An indoor beach of 4 000 m² with eight metres of clear height, entered for Expo 2017. The clear height is the brief: below it the room is a swimming hall, and above it the space starts to behave like weather.

Beach

4 000m²

Clear height

8m

Entered

Expo 2017

BM Tower

A business centre planned around floorplate efficiency — how much of each floor a tenant can actually use, settled in the plan long before it is settled on the elevation.

Canyon Mall

A commercial centre shaped as a canyon — the form is the plan, not a name given to it afterwards.

Innovation & Technology Hub

A working ecosystem, not an office block with a label on it. The test is whether anything would change if the sign came down; the plan is drawn so that it would.