White Swan, London
- Residential
- Prestressed Concrete, Substructure
- Client:
- Laing O’Rourke / St James Homes
- Architect:
- HKR Architects
- Contract:
- £12M
The White Swan is a development in the Docklands area that required the latest in analysis and design software, along with post tensioned slab construction to overcome challenging site conditions.
The superstructure for the 4 blocks, which are up to 13 storey’s high, is supported on a ground floor transfer slab allowing a column layout in the basement suitable for car parking. All floors of the buildings were constructed using post-tensioned techniques, which allowed the typical floor slab thickness to be just 200mm with spans of 8.0m. This reduced the overall loads onto the transfer slabs.
A 1m deep post-tensioned transfer slab was designed at basement level, to span 16m across the Blackwall Road Tunnel pile exclusion zone, that bisected the site. In order to gain the approval of Transport for London (TFL), it was necessary to prepare an “AIP” document. Due to our experience in this area we were able to convince TFL that the piling adjacent to the tunnel could be constructed using the relatively cheap bentonite coated piles rather than full mersy bentonite piles.
The finite element software package ‘FLOOR’ was used to design all post-tensioned slabs on this interesting project.
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