Designed as a “vertical city”, Metropolis will provide a new urban polarity for Malta.
The development, which is composed as a cluster characterized by the combination of a podium and a tower, also incorporates a main Piazza to celebrate Maltese social life, vitalized with a variety of public amenities, in addition to areas for art installations.
The strategic choice of our design was to open the Piazza to the main road Triq Testaferrata and use the existing slope of the site as an opportunity to maximize the Ground Floor, creating three different accesses at three different levels: the Upper Ground Floor for Offices, the Intermediate Ground Floor for Retail and Lower Ground Floor for Residential. Each of these accesses is designed to be a short-cut for pedestrian fluxes within the cluster, thus inculcating a sense of urban life in the intervention.
The podium is articulated as Retail and Offices. The Retail block is conceived to host the Multi-store and the Cinemas, with a geometry enhanced by the different incidence of the sun with three different gradients of porosity depending on the internal functions. The Office block is designed as a horizontal tower and the rooftop of the Retail becomes the outdoor space for the Office tower.
Despite its great dimensions (50 levels and 170 metre high), the Residential tower is designed to fit within the micro-scale of the existing Maltese urban landscape, thus creating a fragmentation of the overall mass of the cluster.