Residential

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The Clearings

KPF’s client for The Clearings hoped to build a project of significantly greater area than originally allowed by London city planners. In service of this, KPFui developed a digital version of the Vertical Sky Component analysis— a method used by planners in London to evaluate the impact of new construction on neighborhoods.

Daylight access is safeguarded through the city’s right to light easements, so KPFui’s digital tool allowed for a comprehensive and accurate analysis conducted far more quickly than traditional methods would have allowed. The analysis informed changes to the design that allowed the building to meet additional area requirements while minimizing impact on the right to light of neighboring buildings.

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Boston Harbor Garage

There were two development constraints for the Boston Harbor Garage project: a maximum building height of 600 feet, and adherence to shadow duration regulations (no new areas of shadow lasting one hour or more along Long Wharf on October 26th). KPFui worked closely with XXXX, the state legislator who originally initiated the regulation, to create a custom shadow evaluation tool. The model tested over 7,500 massing variations in search of the largest building envelope that met Boston’s requirements, resulting in a surprising finding to the developer: several options allowed for more than twice the GFA that they had initially expected to achieve.

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One Crown Place

Our project at One Crown Place in London needed to balance sensitivity to its historic context with economic viability for the developer. KPFui conducted a window by window view analysis that evaluated visibility to seven prominent London landmarks, including the CBD cluster, Canary Wharf, London Bridge Tower, The Shard, Tate Modern, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the London Eye. The resulting analysis was used by the client to determine the best unit distribution, and a rate structure was developed according to the quality of each unit’s view. The overall project value was increased by 2 million pounds as a result of the exercise.

Landmark View Tool

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The Bermondsey Project

Unlike in the United States, developers in London don’t have to track zoning density or maximum area restrictions: each project is instead individually assessed by city planners and evaluated according to several different factors. One factor required to achieve approval is the visual presence of the new development throughout the neighborhood and city. Generally the less visibly obtrusive a project is, the more likely it is to be approved by city planners. For the Bermondsey Project, an especially large development, KPFui created an Urban Visibility Tool calibrated to the human field of view that tracks the visibility of the proposed development. By incorporating the results from the tool, KPF’s design was able to maximize density and minimize visual impact. It was approved, then?

Luxembourg

Because of the mixed-use development’s inclusion of a significant residential component and location at a major gateway to the historic core of Luxembourg, a primary concern of the project revolved around potential noise pollution from automobile congestion. KPFui used our Noise Analysis Tool to compare the noise exposure of the as-of-right zoning entitlement to our denser proposed design. Existing zoning allowed for 16% of the project’s surface area to be above the noise threshold, while our proposal lowered that number to only 1% - a significant reduction. Allowing KPFui’s analysis to inform design from initial design phases allowed KPF to develop a project that performs better than standard zoning would have allowed and even dampens automobile-induced noise pollution.