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Fronting Oxford Street in London's elegant Mayfair district, where high-end shops mingle with exclusive residences and commercial buildings, Park House was developed to deliver an entire city block of prime, mixed-use space without overpowering its neighbours. Robin Partington & Partners (RPP) designed the GBP 135 million building with 8,140 square metres of retail space at basement, ground, and first-floor levels on Oxford Street; 15,140 square metres of Grade A office space on seven floors with a prestigious West End address on Park Street; and 5,430 square metres of residential space for 39 private flats with a discrete East End entrance on North Row.

The building's curvilinear, fully glazed facade presented the technical challenge of bending glass to its limit. RPP used Bentley's GenerativeComponents to design acladding system with the optimal number of glass panels, and an innovative solution for joining the siding and roofing.

ISLAND ABOVE LONDON UNDERGROUND
Developed by Land Securities, the largest commercial property company in the United Kingdom, Park House was delivered on time and budget under a fixed-price, single-stage, design build on contract. Mace served as the construction manager, and RPP as the architect.

Building a 46,000-square-metre, nine-story building on one of Europe's busiest shopping streets was no small challenge. Streets adjacent to the island site were not parallel, buildings at either end of the block were not proportionate, and London Underground's Central Line ran just a few metres below the location. Moreover, each programmatic use of the building required its own structural solution.

Headquartered on New Oxford Street around the corner from the Park House site, RPP turned these design challenges into opportunities by creating a building that artfully knit together the mismatched townscape. Park House's asymmetrical form rises gently, blending from the smaller buildings on one end to the larger buildings at the other end, creating the illusion that the 645 metre long behemoth recedes into its surroundings.

The glass cladding system not only made a bold statement but also united the building's three functions. Designing the system posed the unique challenge of testing how much "give" was in the glass panels, which determined how many panels had to be custom-formed by the cladding system provider, and how many stock panels could be formed on site. Joining the cladding system to the roofing system was also complicated by the curved forms.

RPP used GenerativeComponents and Bentley Architecture to explore various design iterations, varying the size, number, and curvature of the panels to achieve a buildable solution. Bentley's Structural Modeler was used to address the structural challenges of the mixed-use building.

ITERATIVE DESIGN YIELDS INNOVATION
GenerativeComponents is an associative and parametric modeling system that provided an efficient way to explore alternatives for the cladding system without building the detail design model for each scenario. Using GenerativeComponents while working with the cladding system provider, RPP arrived at a design solution that significantly reduced the total cost of materials.

It was determined that a degree of "cold-bending" of glass panels could be done during installation. As a result, the cladding system was comprised of 98 percent stock panels, which were bent within pre-determined stress limits, and just 2 percent of the more expensive custom-formed panels.

The juncture of the cladding system and roofing system posed another technical challenge. The curved form of the body of the building was made up of intersecting tori, with the four corners described by a single conical surface. In the "fillet" zone, where the side torus blends with the roof torus, Bentley Architecture was used to develop a unique transition zone with double-curve panels. A series of quick iterations of form and context allowed RPP to achieve a constructible solution.

The GenerativeComponents analysis and 3D model of the ambitious design gave the design-build team confidence that it was both buildable and within budget. Coupled with the ease of plan, section and elevation extraction, using Bentley Architecture made a potentially difficult task much more controllable. The unique curvilinear building form meant that any floating-point discrepancies created during data translation could cause major coordination problems. AKT II, the structural engineers on the project, used Structural Modeler to eliminate the possibility of any such data translation errors.

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