Parabola

Name:  Parabola
Product used: TITAN Support System
Location: Kensington High Street, London

Project Background:

The Parabola building formerly known as the CommonWealth Building, is an iconic tent-like structure that sits on Kensington High Street. The Parabola’s initial construction was a bold piece of architecture for when it was built in the 1960’s with a hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof. Designs at the time only permitted half of the concrete roof construction to be built with the remaining roof built traditionally.

After being empty for nearly 10 years, an agreement was reached in early 2008 with the Design Museum for a new 100,000 sqft museum in the Exhibition Building as well as 3 new high quality residential apartment buildings which will complement the Exhibition Building. The 62 residential units consisted of 9x one bedroom, 13x two bedroom, 28x three bedroom, 11x four bedroom and 1x five bedroom units.

J.Coffey Ltd was awarded the contract from Mace to strengthen the roof structure, before any refurbishment work was undertaken. Their main scope of work was to provide support to the roof skeleton while the spines and valleys of the roof were strengthened. Thanks to our close working relationship with J.Coffey Ltd, they contacted us to provide technical support and equipment for the support of the roof while strengthening works took place.

The hyperbolic paraboloid skeleton of the roof was very difficult to support, as it sloped in three different directions, meaning that a bespoke solution was required to cater for the unusual nature of the project. We also had to consider very high lateral loads from the structure and the fact that the roof had to be supported from the 3rd floor while back propping these high loads down to the ground floor. We were unable to fix our support systems to the structure directly due to its...

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