Nova
London, UK

The Client

Land Securities

The Architect

PLP

The Project

Redevelopment of the area within the Bressenden Place area of Victoria in London. The project originally comprised of 8 separate buildings. Three have now been constructed with two more to be built. Of the ones constructed, one is a residential development and two are commercial. Each building has retail units located at ground level. Of the two buildings yet to be constructed one will be commercial whilst the other will be a mixture of social, residential and a library. Again, both buildings will have retail units. All building share a common basement area.

The Brief

To provide a vertical transportation (VT) solution for all the different building types that supported the best in class strategy of the client, to be comfortably compliant with current design criteria and to be sufficiently future proof for the demands of potential tenants and changing tenant types.

The Solution

Through a comprehensive and extensive design process, and detailed studies of numerous options over a period of 5 years, each building had a robust and effective VT design solution that reflected anticipated usage including incorporation of the basement, and the change in society, where the provision of hundreds of car parking spaces was changed to hundreds of cycling spaces.

The design period was such that early designs were based on the British Council of Offices (BCO) 2009 design criteria for offices. However, when the BCO guide was updated in 2014, the VT design was still able to comply with the new changes.

During the design period, the development and installation of destination control grew significantly, and this facilitated the design process, where even now, the controls installed could be considered as leading technology.