FARYNERS HOUSE
Location: Monument, City of London
Status: Stage 4
Architect: Fletcher Priest
Client: Class Premium
Introduction
Very few locations are so connected to London’s history. Faryners House, named for Thomas Faryner, the baker on Pudding Lane where the Great Fire of London started. is being redeveloped to provide a premium and striking ten-storey office in the heart of the City.
The scheme will be delivering c.97,000 sq ft of offices, with a strong focus on environmental performance, wellness and occupier amenity. The building is characterised by series of setbacks which creating cascading landscaped terraces to overlook this iconic location in London.
History
To the west of the site lies Monument Square and the Grade I Listed Monument, a designated scheduled ancient monument designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke in memory of The Great Fire of London of 1666. Faryners House is named after Thomas Farriner, whose bakery was the start of the Great Fire just to the south of the site on Pudding Lane. A new visitor centre within the redevelopment will tell the story of the Great Fire.
Prior to the current building, the site, which slopes by over a storey, was occupied by several buildings. These were demolished to make way for a single building in the early 1970s, Faryners House, designed by Richard Seifert, designer of the Natwest Tower and Centrepoint, with Arup as structural engineers. The current building is a six-storey office building with a central courtyard that does not maximise the use of the space.
(Desaturate%2030%25).jpg)
Approach
The building height is constrained by LVMF viewing corridor. Additionally, with the need to offer generous clear floor to ceiling heights and flexibility to office tenants whether to adopt a floor and ceiling mounted ventilation system, allowable structural zones were typically limited to 250mm.
The set backs in the massing, whilst fully utilised for landscaped terraces are also provided in response to the height and proximity of the neighbouring buildings. The setbacks therefore do not always align with primary column grids and transfer elements were required to navigate and support these setbacks.
To achieve the setbacks that form the terraces whilst supporting the heavy precast façade and landscaping, transfer beams are required within a very constrained structural depth with PT tendons running in the supported slab. We designed transfer beams with a wide steel inverted T to form the bottom flange and permanent formwork within a wide RC beam. Diagonal reinforcement is welded to the web of the steel T to achieve composite action between steel and concrete, as there was insufficient structural depth or width to fully engage more traditional shear studs. The steel T is shallow enough that the PT tendons can run over the top.
The scheme retains the existing basement and ground floor retaining walls with indirect re-use of the existing piles to form new raft foundations to support the new massing.
Working with A2 geotechnical engineers was key to unlocking the potential of the existing piles in a new pile-assisted raft. This enabled us to reuse all existing piles and minimise the number of new piles. This process lead to only thirty new small diameter piles being required under the core to control differential settlement. The size and length of the piles was designed specifically to enable their installation prior and during demolition with the use of mini-rig within the existing basement.