One fine morning you just draw your beautiful red shine Cadillac in the middle of the city urban area and suddenly make a plan for cinema with your girlfriend. At that time you just drive your Cadillac in the car parking building of city center. Just you entered inside the car parking building, see around and just amaze with interior of that car parking building. At that time, just think about in deep corner of your heart that wow,… Just lovely. I can’t believe that now a days car parking building also sophisticated and really pleasant to eyes.
Right fellas,…. This is a demand of today’s urban infrastructure and Multi story car parking is also and undivided part of that urban infra. Here we see further a very beautiful and really fantastically carved out Bircham park’s Transferium – A multi story car parking in Derriford, plymouth in United Kingdom.
Transferium – A Multi Story Car Parking
Here, we go with car parking project lies north of Plymouth city center located in North West Quadrant. It is the first phase of the integration of the North West Quadrant with the future plans for Derriford Hospital.
Derriford Hospital is one of the largest and most important hospitals in the Southwest. The Bircham Park Transferium improves the patient’s and staff’s experience on arrival. It removes the majority of on-grade parking to release land for further development phases of the master plan and also delivers important facilities to the approximately 11,000 staff and visitors that move through the Hospital every day.
Fact File of Transferium
- Architects: S333 Architecture + Urbanism
- Location: Derriford, Plymouth, Plymouth, Plymouth PL6, UK
- Year: 2014
- Photographs: Jan Bitter
- Programme: 645.6 m2 retail and commercial space, 858 m2 Office space, Parking facilities for 627 cars
- Client: Wharfside Regeneration Ltd
- Site Area: 1 ha
- Building Costs: GBP 10,500,000
What Architect Think about Design and Layout
We have called it a ‘Transferium’ (dutch word) because it is more than a car parking. This is a hybrid building that explores the possibilities of two types of apparently contradictory operations into a new combination of an office and retail building with the utility of a car park building to form a compact typology.
Where active frontage is not possible, there is high quality green walls and permeable elevations. The large amount of car parking is located at the bottom of the site. This ‘hides’ the 6 storeys of car parking in the valley.
This provides constant activity, making it a full-time working building. The building forms part of the entrance and visitor hub that can deliver convenience, services and amenities to staff and waiting patients or relatives as well as creating a safe car parking environment for 600 cars.
The offices, retail, and food and beverage are located at the top of the site where the topography is at its flattest. This presents a more modest 3 storeys onto a new public street. A glazed lobby space on the north-eastern corner gives access to offices and car park and is strategically located to offer direct access from the hospital and clear orientation when arriving.
The slope also drives the overall typological design. To reduce the cost of excavation the car parking is a scissor layout that climbs up the hill following the topography. This allows for the possibility of dual entrances to the main one being at the south on Morlaix Drive, combined with a management suite, and the other being at the north on the new High Street. This delivers cars at different levels and subsequently avoiding congestion.
Car Parking Building Appearance and Scale
The Car parking building sits below the height of the adjacent hospital. The mass is reduced by grouping floors into pairs, These step in section and shift in plan to accommodate the slopes of the awkward site. In doing so, they create walkways, terraces and areas of shelter around the building.
One dominant level extends north and west to form ground-floor shops and cafes. This activates the main street, leading pedestrians to Outlook Terrace, a sunny public view overlooking Bircham Valley local nature reserve and a future park space. splits the building mass further reducing the mass where it will interface with future phases.
Subsequently its appearance takes the topographical and layered form as a starting point for a series of differentiated ‘landscape’ treatments; a forest-like lattice, of metal, tree trunks and ivy.
The base of the Car parking building emerges as one moves from the High Street south to Morlaix Drive. Here a green facade optimists the planting possibilities and environmental opportunities.
Ivy is planted that climb over a lattice of stainless steel wires. These provide protection from the sun in summer, allow solar penetration in winter, and help in the convection cooling of air.
The commercial and retail spaces are clad in a curtain wall of aluminum and glass that incorporates lighting and signage. Moving away from the street this transforms into the forest-like lattice of powder-coated metal bars. Graphics and color were defined to give clear orientation at entry points and around the deep plan of the car park
The upper level is a wooden screen made of pine logs with varying degrees of density to give an undulating appearance. The middle section of the roof is planted with low maintenance, non-accessible grasses and mosses to provide a rich and diverse wildlife resource and aid water retention, absorption of CO2 and runoff.
The Transferium Court is the natural sloping landscape on the western facade below the Outlook Terrace and is to be implemented at a future phase.
Image Gallery:
The pronounced topography with its southerly aspect drove the design and layout of the Transferium a car parking as the significant change in levels led to a series of constraints in layout and opportunities to reduce the bulk of the building.
The constraints that include the high-pressure gas main to the west, and the existing steep levels of the site restrict the size of the footprint. The natural slope allowed the more densely developed plots such as the ‘Transferium’ to be at the bottom of the slope and the low-density predominantly residential plots to be at the top of the slope. This allows long views for all and lessens the impact of larger development across the wider area.