Salford Eco City | Centralised City Towers Part 2 Project 2013 Tony O'Meara Liverpool John Moores University Liverpool | UK Looking through the eyes of designers in the 21st century, it is inevitable not to see sustainability issues featuring frequently within their vista. If the products they conceive embrace sustainability, then the design approach used would be termed holistic in that it does not only look at the conventional design issues but rather looks at the design activities and practices that strive at protecting our precious planet through an environmentally, socially, technologically, and economically sensitive approach to designing.The initial concept was to embrace the holistic view using the building as a connection to the surrounding landscape, that the project would break the grid and create shards of interaction within the city, the whole project would embrace the technological tools at hand to create a carbon neutral building as an example of sustainability, in keeping with the ideas of the masterplan.The towers themselves would become a sustainable icon not only for the proposed Salford eco city but also an example of how the design principles of places like Singapore, China and Japan can be used in this country to enhance social interaction within high rise developments that is severely lacking in the current situation.Instead of focusing on the design of a single tower, the masterplan allowed for the connection of two podiums with two towers on each. In this pairing it created a megastructure that was to be seen as a central point for the new ‘Salford Eco City’ and a design for connecting elements that joined the four towers together, such as the mid-level skybridges and upper-level urban spaces. Influenced by the concept of connection. The design also includes continual circulatory / processionary routes in the vertical plane such as ramps, inclined escalators traversing tower facades and high-speed lifts to connect the ground floor plane with the public skybridge and urban levels above. The highlight of the design is the large public realm embracing all the towers at their base, creating open green space in the historic context of the graving docks, creating a space for the inhabitants of the megastructure and the city itself. Tutor(s) Ian Wroot