New Encants Market

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The design of the New Encants Market involved many aspects of engineering, from overcoming the challenges of complex city centre infrastructure diversion to the erection of an intricate roof with up to 24m cantilevers.  Post-tensioned sandwich slabs were used to provide long span fair faced concrete solutions to heavily loaded floor areas. The roof design involved analysis of both wind and fire loads in order to optimise steel weight, as well as including a complex erection sequence to allow construction at ground floor level before the roof was jacked into its final position.

Judge's comment:

The design incorporated many aspects of good engineering practice adapted to a complex city centre site, and shows intelligent use of construction techniques to overcome problems of infrastructure diversion. Particularly noted were the use of post-tensioned concrete sandwich floors providing architectural fair-faced soffit finish with minimum structural depth, and optimisation of the steel roof through accurate construction sequence modelling and wind load analysis.