Canada Place, Canary Wharf, London Docklands

Architect and designer: Chapman Taylor

Canada Place, the latest retail addition to the fast-expanding Canary Wharf business environment, caters for a very different market to the usual shopping centre and this is reflected in its premium design. High quality materials, carefully-controlled branding on shopfronts and, perhaps most unusually, the successful integration of art into the interior design adds up to an up-market environment for the predominantly high street fashion retailers that Canary Wharf were keen to attract to their new retail offer.

Not that you’d know it was there from the outside – Canada Place is a small (6000m2) underground mall beneath Canada Square Park, and only peering into Ron Arad’s Big Blue skylight offers any hint of the new shopping centre below. Inside, Chapman Taylor created an unusually wide mall (as part of a cruciform plan), which allows room for Terence Woodgate’s bespoke public seating, where shoppers can sit and eat their lunch, as well as catering for the throughflow of both shoppers and passing office workers using the mall as a dry, pleasant alternative to braving the often breezy outside environment.

‘We wanted to get away from the very traditional linear mall,’ says project architect Richard Harbord of Chapman Taylor.

Unlike at Southampton’s WestQuay, where retailers are encouraged to break up the straight line of shopfronts and animate them as much as possible, Canary Wharf preferred to put in all the shopfronts itself. While retailers could choose from five configurations, all are as transparent as possible, with store branding hung behind the shopfront.

The idea is to produce a more classic look, according to Canary Wharf vice-president for retail Camille Waxer. ‘A shopfront that might have been really trendy one year so often becomes dated the next,’ she says. Canary Wharf extended its practice of commissioning art throughout the estate to Canada Place, where it is an integral part of the design.

Getting light into the mall was important without ruining the landscaping of the park above and Arad’s sculpture-cum-skylight – a 15m-wide asymmetric glass fibre desk atop a glass cylinder – was the perfect solution, allowing views both ways while functioning as art in its own right. This skylight was supplemented in the mall by a row of occuli lit by lighting designer Jonathan Speirs to change colour and mood throughout the day. Antoni Malinowski’s very effective floor decoration is cut into the German Kelheimer limestone floor, stretching out in inlaid strands along the mall to reflect the flow of circulation and drawing shoppers through the space. In another section of the work, Malinowski has used white shard-shaped inlays beneath the skylights to suggest rays of light. ‘We don’t want to take [attention] away from the actual shops but we want a nice environment to be in,’ says Waxer.