News releases
Construction begins on Atkins’ Pacific Dream Plaza in Qingdao, China - 09 February 2012
Construction of the Atkins-designed Pacific Dream Plaza in Qingdao in northern China has begun. The 300,000m² river-side mixed use development is centred around a series of landscaped squares and paths and includes a 30-storey five-star hotel tower, 1,500 residential units, and office and retail space.
Peter Ridley, Atkins’ senior design director, said: “This project presented a fascinating challenge because the area was partially enclosed by a river but it also gave us a great opportunity to create a remarkable quarter in a new urban location. Through rigorous testing of the client’s needs we have created a development that is distinctive, functional and one with value as a new outdoor space amenity to the wider community.”
The development is enclosed on two sides by water and integrated into the surrounding neighbourhoods on its other faces. These boundary conditions presented a unique challenge for the architects as there were four ‘fronts’ to the development, meaning that façade design and building form had to be carefully modelled to integrate well in all directions. There was no opportunity for the ‘back door’ that heavily serviced mixed-use projects might normally have. This also created complex traffic and servicing problems which the architects solved in collaboration with Atkins’ traffic engineering team from its Hong Kong office.
The curvaceous building forms evolved from a comprehensive set of strategic concept studies, and as they developed the architects worked with Atkins’ sustainability team at Faithful+Gould in Shanghai to boost the project’s low carbon credentials. This meant testing the sunlight, shading and wind conditions within the quarter to ensure the circulation within the retail buildings created a primary circulation loop. The idea was to connect indoor and outdoor spaces in the three distinct elements of the retail offering: the outdoor ‘lifestyle’ village, the department store and the enclosed mall.
Steven Hill, Atkins’ associate and project architect, said: “The design process gave us – and the client – great confidence in the solution that we generated. We tested in excess of 30 options at different scales and levels of detail, beginning with very rough models and then refining the designs in workshops. The key to the process was that it was not scattergun; strategic solutions were allowed to evolve and cross-pollinate each other until we reached a design that everyone was happy with.”
Atkins’ Beijing studio undertook the architectural design from masterplanning through to detailed design and was assisted by Atkins’ structural, traffic and sustainability teams in the UK, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
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Notes to editors: Atkins (www.atkinsglobal.com) is one of the world's leading engineering and design consultancies*, employing some 17,700 people across the UK, North America, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Europe. It has the breadth and depth of expertise to plan, design and enable some of the world's most technically challenging and time critical infrastructure projects. * It is the largest engineering consultancy in the UK (New Civil Engineer Consultants File 2011) and the 13th largest global design firm (Engineering News-Record 2011). Recent projects include: - Major infrastructure works, such as the design and programme management of the civil works for the Dubai Metro red and green lines in the UAE;
- Key rail projects – providing architectural and engineering design services on Crossrail, Europe’s biggest civil engineering project in London, UK, and designing stations, tunnelling and track systems for Gautrain, South Africa’s first high speed line;
- Renewable energy schemes - transformer platform design for the Thanet offshore wind park in the UK’s North Sea;
- Multi-year architecture-engineering construction management services for the US National Park Service, including projects such as rehabilitation of the Furnace Creek Visitor Center and Administrative Complex at California’s Death Valley to meet the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold certification standards;
- High profile transport planning and urban design – our innovative scheme to deliver a diagonal crossing at Oxford Circus in London, UK, has helped tackle the problem of pedestrian crowding;
- Water and environmental projects – critical programme management of storm protection works in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana in North America, providing expertise in coastal restoration, engineering, environmental and GIS support to rebuild defenses and protect habitats;
- Multidisciplinary building design – Northwood Primary School in Darlington, UK, is an exemplar project which raises standards for environmental design and community engagement.
Atkins was named among The Sunday Times 25 Best Big Companies to Work For 2011, won Consultancy of the Year in the CIBSE Low Carbon Performance Awards 2010, received the first ever certification of the Carbon Trust Standard awarded to an engineering consultancy in the construction sector, and was included in The Times Top 50 Employers for Women 2011 and The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers 2010. Atkins was also construction and civil engineering sector winner for the fifth consecutive year in the Target National Graduate Recruitment Awards 2010 and was awarded a RoSPA Gold Award 2011 for excellence in control of health and safety in the workplace. Atkins is the official engineering design services provider for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. |