New architectural Desing

It is a new architectural Desing

The hub, a mixing chamber and circulation space for both people and incoming air, is clad inside
and out with bright-green composite panels manufactured in Germany. The panels splay and peel open haphazardly, distorting the hub’s egglike form and providing areas for air entry and exit through the gaps between the panels and into the exterior ductwork. Originally, this part of the building was to be clad in copper panels, but the matte-plastic skin actually harmonizes better with the rest of the building’s palette of industrial materials.

In today’s era of sick-building syndrome and fears of SARS outbreaks and bioterrorist attacks, most architects and engineers strive to obscure a building’s mechanical systems, or at least place the necessary equipment out of harm’s way. But architect Sheppard Robson and the engineers of Arup have done just the opposite at the Fitzrovia Building, the latter’s newly designed, 125,000-square-foot headquarters in London, which boldly displays the innards of its HVAC system. In so doing, the design team has created an alluring new relationship between architecture, engineering, and urban space—one that negotiates the complex role of air-handling technologies in an age of environmental and security concerns.
Over the past 50 years, Arup has expanded its operations to include numerous buildings in and around the Fitzroy Street area of London, just north and west of the heart of Bloomsbury. The collection of buildings, dubbed the “Fitzrovia Estate,” was a sprawling aggregation of structures with few physical connections. In March 2001, Arup, Sheppard Robson, and real estate management firm London Merchant Securities announced plans to use architecture, small-scale urban planning, and sustainable engineering to turn the collection of buildings into a campus for Arup. “The project will establish a coherent campus that will reflect both externally and internally what Arup stands for. It will provide an exciting and inspirational workplace to support and encourage the firm’s philosophy of creativity and innovation,” said Arup officials at the project’s onset. The Fitzrovia Building is the first step in this plan.
Turning HVAC inside out Sheppard Robson and Arup used the distribution of air and light as a leitmotif in bringing together two seven-story, 1960s-era office blocks that constitute the new building. It now reads as a unified ensemble, laced together with pronounced ductwork, a dramatic double-glazed curtain wall, and a standout component: a lozenge-shaped element, called “the hub,” which forms the locus of a unique air-delivery system for the complex.
In the existing buildings, low floor-to-ceiling heights precluded the use of underfloor air distribution for heating and cooling, an energy-saving strategy that Arup pioneered years ago. Instead, the engineers mounted air-handling ducts on the exterior of the building, in a clearly visible space within the cavity of a double-glazed curtain wall. Solar-shading louvers are also installed between the glazed faces of this curtain wall to reduce heat gain within the complex. The windows facing Fitzroy Street are operable to encourage natural ventilation, whereas those that look out on the warmer, south-facing Howland Street are fixed, and the HVAC ducts in this area more protected in the plenum space between the double glazing. A computerized building management system (BMS) controls the entire operation, maintaining comfortable indoor temperatures while also balancing energy consumption. Though the double glazing, louvered shading devices, and BMS are common features in Europe’s energy-conscious architecture, this project’s brazen display of its HVAC equipment makes it exceptional