[NorthMancBeds]

This was a legitimate, work related visit, but one I don’t wish to publicly advertise. I thought I might share it here though. Hexagon Tower was completed in 1971 for ICI at their plant in Blackley. It was designed by Richard Seifert who also designed Hilton House and Gateway House in Manchester







The client commissioned models and impressions from the architect and these were used as press tools as the scheme progressed on site. The ground conditions were such that the piling solution warranted a special mention in Building Specification, December 1972.

Seifert’s corporate buildings were regularly bold, those in Manchester no exception, but this is perhaps the most monolithic of his North-West schemes. The site, in a depression adjacent the River Irk in Blackley, was formerly owned by ICI, by whom the building was commissioned. At one time, a four storey ICI laboratory building by émigré architect Serge Chermayeff also stood close. Here, the simple massing, formed by the junction of horizontal and vertical volumes, bears several of Seifert + Partners trademark gestures; the hexagonal geometries, the cut away sections of wall to form entrance ways between structural elements, and the repetitive facade.



The end wall is reminiscent of, but almost the inverse of, Tolworth Tower, also by Seifert.

The tower and podium configuration is a product of the brief; the machine hall had to be at ground level and have no construction above. The tower’s construction is made explicit by this diagram from Building, September 1969.



The narrow tower has no internal columns, the structural grid is mirrored in the services arrangement and the two co-exist outside the usable volume of the laboratory space, in the walls and floor.



This solution is expressed in the deep reveals of the main façade, services travel vertically between the window modules.

Whilst somewhat hidden, the building reveals itself fantastically from elevated vantage points, the tram south from Bowker Vale station being one such location.



Originally it was intended that four of these towers would be built and run along the river valley in some sort of massive futurist domino arrangement.



Internally, there are still several remaining original features that have been clad and recently uncovered. Perhaps most striking is the plate-folded concrete soffit to what was once the main entrance foyer.



In this contemporary image it is shown above the mezzanine level exhibition space; note the amazing ‘Queen’s Award to Industry’ logo by Abram Games. It is now hidden behind a suspended ceiling and has had an awful 1980s balustrade added, but would certainly give Foreign Office Architects a run for their money today.



There are also remnants of the psychedelic carpet in evidence.



The top floor is reserved entirely for plant equipment; the laboratories obviously demanded a significant provision of such.



Similarly, the basement is a significant void too.



Seen here with typical brown carpet tiles, Floor 11 is currently vacant and the strip back has revealed the original timber lined ducts in the floor and ceiling which distributed the array of requisite services including high and low pressure steam, vacuum, compressed air, gas, electricity, water, air intake and extract and waste and process extracts. The diagrams below show how this would work in plan and in a typical laboratory bay.













A view from the window reveals that the façade, rather than being a slab is lined with hundreds of thousands of mosaic tiles, again a fairly typical Seifert type application.



This view from the roof shows the top of the columns as they terminate and you can see central Manchester in the background.



To the rear are some cute ancillary structures with substations and incoming mains services distribution boards, these too have the angular hand of Seifert at play.



The curved ramp once provide the main access to the building at the base of the tower. Now one enters the building at grade from the adjacent car park.

peace
NMB