33 Piccadilly: Case Study Transcript

So 33 Piccadilly is a mixed-use facility. Basement up to level one is going to be retail, and then level two up to level nine is going to be office space.

The original building that was on this site was built after the Second World War. Our client decided that the best option was to demolish the original building and construct a better building in the same spot.

The challenges in the area include a lot of close-proximity neighbours: hotels, office buildings, embassies behind us, and the main road, Piccadilly.

Realtime’s scope was to take the project from the demolition of the existing basement ground floor slab.

I was the main engineer responsible for designing the propping system for this project. It’s five levels of props retaining both existing walls and new basement walls.

It all started with collaboration in the beginning, early on, on the design phase with Realtime.

The reason for the propping on this project was to maximise the use of space. If we’d gone down more traditional methods, the client would have lost too much ground coming inboard of the existing structure.

The design brief to Conquip was fairly complex. We had a lot of moving parts to get this to a place where it would work.

The main challenges on the design for this project was the fact that we had three different types of walls in here .

By utilising the props and an underpinning method, we were able to maximise the space we could give back to the client.

In collaboration with Realtime during the early stages of design, we defined very specific points where we could use our equipment to avoid any potential clashes later during construction works.

We had the existing walls, which were incredibly weak. We had to determine how we were going to hold those in place without physically punching through the walls in the first place.

Our equipment going to transfer some forces to those elements to deposit any forces on it and then we had some constraints on depositing shear forces onto the sheet pile wall, so we had to adapt our equipment in order to work as a single beam or improvise some shear key restraints.

We had original carbon targets on our project, and the only way we could achieve is if we do underpinning under the existing basement wall. That was never going to happen without the Conquip basement propping.

We contributed to sustainability by making use of our proprietary equipment and by ensuring an optimised design using our equipment’s full capacity.

Conquip’s temporary works team have been instrumental in third-party approvals for this project.

Their design information and iterative design process has been really clear in demonstrating the temporary propping scheme for retain the existing highways around the boundary of the site.

The Conquip design team have been absolutely fantastic. They’re always there available when you need them.

There’s been a couple of items where we’ve had to call them and say, “Can we change this?” and they’ve always been incredibly helpful and solution-driven, which has been really handy.

Realtime are extremely helpful. They’ve got a really good relationship with Conquip, and any questions that we had or issues that have arise, They’ve dealt with them in absolutely timely manner.