Musical airs in London
Story by
October 3, 2018
What have The Beatles, Adele and a Blackpool engineering company got in common? The new home of Universal Music.
In the heart of London, BAM Construction has constructed the office building on behalf of Argent LLP, Four Pancras Square. The building utilises technology to achieve a BREEAM outstanding rating. Apart from the retail units at ground level, the whole building is let to Universal Music.
As part of its BREEAM target, the building includes passive ventilation. Gilberts provided a bespoke special grille solution to meet the aesthetic and functional requirements.
Approximately 250 metres of 755mm and 680mm linear grilles have been incorporated externally around the full building perimeter, with a similar quantity of 215mm wide grilles on the inside providing ventilation.
The ventilation grilles have been bespoke-engineered to deliver multi-purpose usage: Gilberts mitred the corners of the grilles to acute, obtuse and right-angle requirements to fit the form of the building. The grilles have also been provided with special notches where required to fit the building structure and services, along with having specially placed plates within the grilles with holes to accept CCTV, footfall and landlord cameras along with Wi-Fi bracketry to enable discreet housing of these additional ancillaries.
Gilberts’ technical director, Roy Jones, said: “Four Pancras Square was a challenging prospect as the key was the aesthetic appearance and combined services, along with the scale of the required functional grilles. We worked closely with BAM to develop solutions that helped them incorporate all the building services required, as seamlessly as possible. Uniquely, we have the capability, in-house, to design, manufacture and test our products, therefore we were able to design and fabricate a solution that integrated into the façade and could further accommodate additional equipment with minimal visual evidence.”
