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Essensa Residential Towers

Manila, Philippines
Completed 2001

Twin 116-unit luxury condominium apartment towers in a garden setting
 

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This twin-tower project was undertaken to create a luxury residential estate in the Fort Bonifacio Development Area, a 440-hectare former military base master planned as an Asian garden city with 21st-century infrastructure.

The complex is located on a gateway site adjacent to the exclusive Forbes Park residential district and the neighboring Manila Golf and Polo Clubs. The 30-story towers house four large residential units per floor — one in each lobe of the butterfly-shaped floor plates — for a total of 232 luxury condominiums. Each high-ceilinged apartment, filled with light, draws on local tradition to ensure gracious living in large salas, with generous areas for dining and entertaining, sheltered private balconies, and extensive amenities.

The curvilinear towers are shaped to maximize unobstructed views (and cross-ventilation, if desired), while embracing the lush private gardens at their base. In sharp contrast to other developments in Manila, where properties are more typically built out to their perimeter, Essensa retains nearly 70% of its site for landscaped open space.

The scale and character of the carefully detailed windows is distinctly residential and draws from the elegant Antillan style of Manila's past. Enhanced by the traditions of place, Essensa's dramatic towers, ornamented by nature, achieve a distinctive image and unique identity in the 21st-century city growing up around it.

Major Components

Two 30-story towers (125m high), each with 1,350m² floor plates; four 290m² apartments per floor, each with 3-bedroom suites (plus housekeeper's quarters with separate bed, bath and kitchen); ground floor public rooms and amenities including private dining, fitness center and spa, indoor and outdoor pools, roof-top helipads, backup generator systems

7,000m² landscaped gardens with special site features including jogging paths, meditation garden, children's play areas,  streams, canopy trees, trellises

39,000m² underground with parking for 750 cars

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners services

Architectural Design including public interiors; construction documents for exterior envelope and public interiors; coordination with associate architect on construction documents and construction administration

Associate Architect

Pablo R. Antonio Jr. Design Consultancy Inc., Philippines

Structural

Ove Arup and Partners International, Hong Kong, and
Aromin Sy Structural Engineers, Philippines

Mechanical

Guevara & Partners, Inc., Makati City, Philippines

Landscape

Belt Collins and Associates, Honolulu, HI

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