The world’s longest cantilever recently opened in Dubai, as part of Japanese architects Nikken Sekkei’s mixed-use complex One Za’abeel (pictured below). It features two elegant towers connected by an enclosed horizontal bridge called The Link.
Positioned 100m in the air, The Link’s 66-metre cantilever provides visitors with the illusion of floating in mid-air. It was created using a robust outer tubular structure system with its main steel members arranged in a diamond grid pattern along four sides to minimise torsion while creating a contiguous, column-free interior space.
Image credit: Hufton + Crow
Italian architecture studio Network of Architecture (NOA)’s new wellbeing area for an Alpine hotel features a suspended platform with a 20-metre overhang (pictured in the main image). Hovering 15 metres above the ground, and supported by two pillars clad in larch logs, it’s close to a cantilevered swimming pool which the firm created for the Italian resort in the Dolomites back in 2016.
Visitors reach the wellbeing area via a suspended walkway, which at the same time opens up to the newly constructed relaxation area. It features a group of inverted and upturned micro-structures with gabled roofs, evoking an upside-down mountain village reflected on water.
Cantilevers ensure a sense of arrival at the new vertical work campus for auditing and consulting firm PwC Germany in Dusseldorf. Designed in a collaboration between UNStudio and German architecture firm HPP Architects, the 60-metre high building follows the shape of the site with a triangular floorplan and stands on a two-storey podium. To emphasise the main entrance and to distinguish the volumes of the podium and the tower, the tip of the tower cantilevers approximately 11 metres above the driveway (pictured below). The seemingly floating tower volume is supported by a three-dimensional V-shaped column.
Image credit: H.G. Esch
Cantilevers don’t always have to appear high tech. Hungarian studio RAPA Architects has created a connection between modernity and tradition with its cantilevered thatched holiday home on the shores of Lake Balaton. It uses locally sourced materials such as volcanic stone and reeds which grow abundantly at the lakeside. Reed is used not only as roofing but to cover the whole top floor, even the bottom of the cantilever.
Meanwhile Taliin-based firm Arsenit’s treehouse called Piil, the studio’s inaugural project, features a large, cantilevered living space over four metres above ground creating a sheltered wooden terrace below. The pine clad modular home, located on the edge of a forest in Estonia, was inspired by the country’s observation towers and blends in sympathetically with its woodland surroundings.
We hope to see many entries as striking as these amongst the inaugural WAN Awards EMEA. Don’t forget the standard entry deadline of March 15th is just four weeks away. Find out more about the awards, and how to enter, here.
Main image credit: Alex Filz
