Borrowed Light
What to do with a plot that has windows on one side and neighbours on three.
A landlocked site produces a deep plan, and a deep plan produces rooms nobody wants to be in. The conventional answers are to accept it and call the back half ancillary, or to cut a lightwell and lose the area anyway.
The third answer is to cut the well and then make it work twice: glaze it at roof level, hang the circulation off it, and open habitable rooms onto it as well as onto the street. The area is lost either way, but a shaft that lights seven storeys and carries the stair is doing two jobs instead of one.
At The Rise the shaft reaches the entrance hall from seven floors up. On an overcast December afternoon the ground floor needs no artificial light at all, which for a building on a landlocked plot is not a small thing.