The Lubetkin apartment

The central living space reads less like a conventional sitting room and more like a linear interior landscape running beneath the vaulted ceiling. Its length encourages a slow, promenading use: you walk, pause, look out, sit, then move again, rather than occupying a single static position.

Because the glazing can be fully opened, the boundaries between interior and terraces soften, and the room behaves differently in each season. In winter it becomes a deeply sheltered belvedere; in summer, with the doors retracted, the three zones of living, threshold and terrace fuse into a single, expanded platform in the sky. 

Of the dramatic effect of the Penthouse's vaulted ceiling, John Allan goes on to say:

"In reality, the centring effect of the parabolic vault is all-persuasive, its perfectly square outline defining the tranche of space below. This mode of formalising a plan from the ceiling down rather than from the walls up has an obvious parallel in Soane’s celebrated breakfast rooms at Pitzhanger and Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

But those little gems are too small, or their surrounding contexts too large and spatially diverse, for them to exert the dominance of Lubetkin’s serene carapace. All other spaces and functions are there to serve it…"