4 Glass Wharf

Exemplary multi-occupier office building in the heart of Bristol’s business district

A new, high-quality, office building comprising 8-storeys, together with a secure basement car park, cycle storage, and landscaped areas at ground level.   The scheme is located in the rapidly growing Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone and transforms the local area by creating amenity spaces for occupiers and the wider community. This prominent development site is highly visible when entering Bristol by rail, and is located close to both Bristol Temple Meads station and Brunel floating harbour. The site is well served by public transport.

Particular engineering focus was given to promote biodiversity and sustainability, creating spaces that are desirable and flexible to serve the tenant market for years to come.  Open aspect offices with an impressive clear headroom and clean slab soffit are achieved by adopting a limited number of internal columns to rationalise floor depths and to allow terracing of columns to the rear of the building.  Material weights and volumes are optimised to reduce carbon impact.  A slim post-tensioned slab, with an edge beam, minimise material volumes whilst controlling critical deflections on the façade.  Cement replacement products are written into the base specification, as we seek to further limit the impact of embodied carbon.

The building design is targeting a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating and ‘Excellent’ as a minimum.   The civil engineering strategy provides a specific response to the site flood risk, with allowances for future climate change. Consideration of future design criteria in our changing world, together with the development of a Sustainable Urban Drainage Strategy, limits the impact of the development on others and has been incorporated into the design.  On-site filtration and attenuation techniques improve water quality and restrict peak discharge to the surrounding network.

Main image credit: Darling Associates Architects