Construction is underway on a mixed use development that will create a dramatic addition to the skyline on the edge of King George’s Park in Wandsworth.
Clarkebond is providing façade consultancy services to Henry Construction and to developers Strawberry Star on the Bronze project, which derives its name from the building’s visually distinct and striking bronze façade.
The Bronze development will provide 1500m2 of new business space in a 4 storey tower alongside 77 apartments in a cluster of three bronze residential towers that step dynamically in height, up to a maximum of 20 storeys, and stagger in footprint.
Each residential apartment has full height glazing, maximising views to King George’s Park, flooding the apartments with natural light. The bronze cladding that wraps around the towers reflects the lighting and lamp industrial heritage of the local area. The ground floor will also provide space for a new café fronting onto the park.
A building’s façade sets its style, form and brand, but as well as achieving the architect’s vision, the façade engineer’s design must consider many other factors including buildability, maintenance, lifecycle, sustainability and safety.
In this case, the project’s façade is a mixture of stick façade system on the commercial tower and unitised façade system on the residential tower. A challenge to the façade design has been meeting the London Plan thermal requirements for the residential tower which set a target emission rate 25% below the 2010 building regulations for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in buildings.
Another challenge to the building on this project is that there is only a 2 metre construction zone around the whole site and one façade extends right onto the edge of the site. Clarkebond design engineers coordinated the complex façade design, including both stick and unitised systems and completed environmental façade analysis (thermal and condensation calculations) to ensure the stringent London Plan U-value requirements were met.
It is expected that the building will achieve a BREEAM Very Good rating.
