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John Lewis Building Façade in Highcross

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posted on 2018-05-29, 15:38 authored by Johnny Xu
The housing and ground-floor commercial units are clad in red bricks and terracotta, echoing a long-established Leicester theme. But the John Lewis store is faced in glass curtain walling with a design based on a historic textile pattern (Taylor, 2016: 310).

The architectural design of the Highcross area has distinctive qualities and unique character compared with other buildings in Leicester. The John Lewis exterior design creates a dual-layer glass skin covered with a distinctive branching pattern that was a well-known Leicester trademark back in the city’s industrial heyday (Richards, 2012: 84). This graphic element is creating appreciation and preservation for what was there, what is there, and what should remain there in the future (Schwanbeck, 2013). The external appearance of buildings functions like advertisement that is to evoke the historical pride, collective memory and cultural identity of the city. The exterior of buildings exactly acts as triumphal displays of its historical, commercial and cultural resources (Julier, 2014: 141-42).

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