Unity
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Providing both residential and commercial space, the scheme has two towers with 161 apartments and 15,000m2 of accommodation for businesses
The Unity building consists of two towers: one residential, the other commercial, designed by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. The site is adjacent to the Liver Building on Liverpool’s historic waterfront. The buildings are joined around a sun-trapping open space designed by muf. The office building is framed and the residential building tunnel-form. This makes the offices flexible and the apartments inflexible.
From a structural perspective the two towers are quite different, but both have combinations of pile and pad foundations to suit the sloping rock-head levels. Both towers have a deep basement constructed from a contiguous piled wall which was chosen to take the traffic surcharge loads from above and to avoid the need to prop the basement wall during construction.
The 27-storey residential tower has three levels of transfer structure:
he first consists of transfer walls above the car park; the second
f transfer walls over the eight-storey block of flats at the tower’s base; and the third is a transfer plate below the penthouse pod.
Data
- Begun: Jun 2004
- Completed: Jul 2006
- Floor area: 36,470m2
- Sectors: Residential, Office
- Total cost: £60M
- Procurement: Bespoke
- Address: Unity Towers, 3 Rumford Place, Liverpool, L3 9BZ, United Kingdom
Professional Team
- Architect: Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
- Client: Rumford Investments
- Project manager: Mace
- Structural engineer: Faber Maunsell
- Building services engineer: Hoare Lea
- Acoustic consultant: Sol Acoustics
- Main contractor: Laing O’Rourke
- Quantity surveyor: Goyne Adams
- Planning supervisor: Goyne Adams
Suppliers
- Cladding: Dane Architectural Systems
- Rainscreen: Kingspan
- Frame Strongforce: M&E Rotary
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