While their built structures may be solid, few cities ever stand still.
As cultures change, demographics shift, and economic cycles rotate
– the vast urban areas that billions of us now inhabit must continually evolve.
Such evolution drives re-development in dense city
centres, creating construction projects that face some extreme complexities.
With multiple new buildings, historic facades, public spaces,
heavy pedestrian and vehicle traffic, hardly
any space and a live Crossrail site beneath them – the team delivering Great Portland
Estates’ Hanover development may well be working on London’s most complex construction project.
With its diverse blend of neighbourhoods and
vibrant culture – punctuated by some of the world’s leading heritage sites – adding
to the dense built fabric of London, is no easy task.
The complexities are acutely pronounced
in Mayfair, where a scheme to connect Hanover Square with New Bond Street is underway. This
development was in fact part-enabled by another scheme; the vast Crossrail programme that
is constructing the Elizabeth Line from east-to-west across London.
Tunnelling beneath a historic
city and navigating through existing below-ground infrastructure, services and building foundations,
Crossrail is an extreme feat of engineering and one of the world’s largest infrastructure projects.
The construction of several new stations along the route is enabling many
redevelopments, particularly in central London, where a number of schemes have risen above station sites.
The Hanover development between Hanover Square
and New Bond Street is one such project. Coinciding with the intentions of Great Portland Estates
to improve the area, the scheme delivers flagship retail while focusing on improving pedestrian
permeability through the block and on the new public space that is being formed
following the trend of creating “destinations” in city centres that boost the immediate area,
foster community interaction and deliver a more human-scale.
To say that constructing this scheme in such a confined area, directly
above a live Crossrail site with its own constraints
and deadlines, is extraordinarily complex, would be an understatement.
The project in fact entails the construction of four distinct buildings – placing a considerable
volume of work within a small site area that is bordered by a number of live retail units
and residences that remain occupied throughout the works.
The historic frontage to New Bond
Street is being retained, carefully held in place with a temporary structure while the
existing building behind it is demolished and the new facility constructed.
The façade is being painstakingly repaired and cleaned, above the live side-walk.
The sheer number of interfaces on the project creates complexity in itself.
Despite being delivered under one project team, each of the buildings has their own specialist teams and suppliers,
who interact with those creating the public spaces, the engineers delivering Crossrail,
London’s transport and planning authorities and the public.
Seeking to plan and coordinate much
of the project in advance, the team developed the Hanover scheme in a data-rich information
modelling environment – effectively constructing and co-ordinating the entire project virtually
and resolving numerous issues before any works commenced for real on the site.
Underpinning this entire process, the team used BIM Track as a central
hub for coordination and communication
across all levels of the project.
Uniting every member of the team on one platform is
effectively democratising the sharing and communication of information related to the project.
A powerful dashboard provides a clear overview of the current status for all those
who need it and has been customised to suit the team’s requirements through BIM Track’s API.
The process of identifying and resolving issues has become everyone’s responsibility,
not just the design teams, changing the dynamic amongst the many organisations working on the project.
I don’t think people truly understand the
complexity of this project. It is like an iceberg, when you cut through the building
you can see the size of the Crossrail development, of a 15-storey building below the 8-storey
oversite development; it’s quite impressive.
Part of this project is above the live New
Bond Street Crossrail development and that brings a lot of challenges, it’s a live
site and we are building above that. So, Crossrail is taking up to Level 1 and then the oversite
development of this project takes it from there up to Level 8.
That has been quite a challenge between the teams. Obviously, people are operating to
different agendas and different programs. Things change, a program is a fluid thing
so we have lots of complex interfacing handover areas, that will probably have to be the hardest thing.
Luckily enough our client, Great Portland
Estates, they pushed for the use of BIM from the start of this project, so we had a very
collaborative approach to the production of information and delivery.
We’ve been employed to deliver this to a level of detail for our client, so we have
used a number of different systems to be able to run that and we use them during our live
design reviews.
We’ve used BIM Track though a number of regular coordination sessions
and what we’ve actually been able to use it to do is as a tool to log the clash items,
identify the areas where there’s an issue, we’ve been able to track the issue through
to a resolution.
It augments our existing processes, so it’s
not changing anything we were already doing. So, we are still designing and producing models
using Revit and Bentley tools and Tekla, and we are federating them and coordinating them
using a tool called Navisworks. BIM Track is a bolt-on to those systems, so I didn’t
have to train anyone to use any additional software.
We do a lot of talking about BIM and there’s a lot of publicity around it but the actual
‘doing it’ element of it is the fun bit and I think on this project we’ve really
been able to exploit that.
I’ve found it incredibly rewarding coming
to coordination sessions and having the room filled out, usually these are things you don’t
want to go to, they are hard sessions, they take a lot of time. We’ve had times where
20-25 people have turned up to these coordination sessions, which is a testament that people
really see the value in it.
The key principles to a BIM project is for
exactly that, is a greater level of collaboration and interface from other people. I think BIM
Track has helped us in doing that, yes.
This proactive approach – that has seemingly
infused the project team at a behavioural level – looks set to generate a time saving
in the coordination process of 20-30%.
The proudest point on this project for me
was getting out of the basement. The basement on this project is incredibly complex and
the amount of M&E and services down there is really, you have to see it to believe it.
The majority of the population walk past something like this and they don’t see the skeletal
system, the heart, the lungs and that’s all of those intricate components that put
this together and there’s a lot of moving parts in that. I think we take that for granted
and I think I get the most satisfaction, I’m most proud that, nobody ever sees any of that,
and that’s our job to do that.
So far, I have been on this job for four years,
so it’s a huge chunk of my professional life already so I am looking forward to coming
and spending some time around this building and seeing it completed.
Though Hanover may appear to face extreme complexities, it is actually largely representative
of the challenges facing project teams in cities around the world.
Managing numerous interfaces, adding to the existing built context and creating an environment
that has a positive impact on the people experiencing it, is a task that those in construction strive
for everyday – but that many outside the industry are rarely able to appreciate.
Projects like this are being undertaken in almost every major city around the world,
fundamentally shaping the way we live our lives and underpinning our societies.
The success of the Hanover development to date is testament to the incredible people
that work in our industry every-day and the impact that innovative new technologies can
play in increasing their abilities.
If you enjoyed this video and would like to
get more from the definitive video channel for construction, subscribe to The B1M.