ICE London Civil Engineering Awards 2013
New Court, NM Rothschild & Sons
Consulting Engineer: Arup
Client: NM Rothschild & Sons, Stanhope
Architect: Office for Metropolitan Architecture
Construction Manager: Lend Lease
All images © Hufton + Crow
Shortlised for the 2012 Stirling Prize this stunning building has made a significant contribution to the City of London. Arup Engineers worked closely from the outset to conceive a building of exceptional quality and flexibility on an extremely constrained and sensitive site. Through the application of comprehensive fully co-ordinated 3D Engineering
Designed by architects OMA with Arup providing multi-disciplinary engineering services, the building is based around a central block with 10 floors of open-plan offices and a roof garden. Three adjoining annexes house private offices, meeting rooms, and the circulation core. On top of the central block, a small tower, the Sky Pavilion, extends to two double-height spaces affording stunning views of the city.
This is the third headquarters building that Rothschild has occupied on the site in St Swithin’s Lane since 1809. The building creates a premium contemporary headquarters and also rejuvenates the historic built environment; reinstating a visual connection between St Swithin’s Lane and St Stephen Walbrook, a church designed by Sir Christopher Wren.
To achieve this, the building is lifted at ground level through the use of carefully designed transfer trusses at façade locations. This creates sight lines through New Court and allows the church’s copper dome and spire visible again in a view that had previously been obscured for generations. Advice from Arup’s traffic experts helped to relocate the loading bay to the rear of the building, enabling this innovation.
As with all central London locations, office space is at a premium. Yet through precision planning the team achieved a high proportion of usable area in this irregular shaped site. Designing the main 30m x 30m floor plate with all the external structure and façade ‘punched’ outside the occupied areas made the building as flexible as possible and created stunning office space.
Arup’s expertise and good relationship with City of London authorities was crucial to maximising the site’s potential. For example, our fire engineers successfully showed that fitting window sprinklers would allow the building to sit safely right on the edge of the site close to other buildings.
We also helped to ensure that New Court achieved a BREEAM for Offices rating of Very Good. With an Energy Performance Criteria (EPC) Energy Performance Asset Rating of B, the building delivers a 34.2% improvement over the UK Building Regulations Part L CO2 target emission.
One of the factors behind this was the close attention we paid to the building fabric’s thermal and solar performance. Another is the highly efficient equipment such as chillers and motors that we specified, along with excellent control, operation and monitoring capabilities in all the building’s systems.
The design process also embraced socio-economic factors. To promote the use of cleaner modes of transport the building has significant bicycle storage and showers. An onsite gym and cafe, as well as external roof space at level 11, will help make New Court a great place to work as well as an innovative, sustainable and striking addition to the City of London’s built historic built environment.
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