100% flexible

Structural steelwork’s long clear spans for floors and roofs provide maximum flexibility of layout for offices, warehouses and living space. This is valuable now, but also provides the flexibility for change that can extend a building’s useful life. This sustainability benefit is unique to steel and is increasingly being recognised as a key consideration of design.

Fact File

Plantation Place South is a major new high quality office development on a prime site at the heart of the City of London, the second of two adjoining buildings. Architect Arup Associates chose a steel frame as a safe and reliable method for the main framework, which satisfied the client’s requirement to maximize the rentable area of the building while providing a building, which answers the needs of the intended users. In addition, for the same floor depth steel offered a 6% saving in frame costs, 10% on foundations and 5% on programme time compared with the concrete options.

An outstanding feature of the design is the use of finite element analysis based software to produce a rigorous analysis of what would happen to the structure in the event of a real-world fire. Conservative assumptions were made in the analysis, such as that the sprinkler system is not working, which calculated where extra fire protection could usefully be applied, and where none is in fact needed.