Central Park expansion
Work has commenced on a new office scheme at the prestigious Central Park office campus in south Dublin. One of Dublin’s most successful suburban developments, Central Park comprises commercial and residential real estate assets located in the Dublin suburb of Leopardstown. The existing commercial component of the Central Park development comprises five modern office buildings and a retail/restaurant building, providing almost 700,000ft2 of space, together with a further 3 ha of development land. All offices are occupied, with blue chip tenants such as Vodafone, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Sage, VW Bank, Ulster Bank and Tullow Oil located at the campus.
The park has excellent links to motorway infrastructure, located adjacent to a junction of the M50 Dublin orbital motorway and also close to the M11 arterial motorway. The development benefits from good links to Dublin city centre with both a dedicated LUAS (Dublin light rail system) station and a bus terminal.
The Central Park Office Park was acquired by Green REIT plc in 2014, and since then, it has advanced plans for further expansion of the campus. Currently, two new office buildings, Blocks H and I, are being progressed, with Block H under construction. Block H will provide 147,000ft2 of high quality commercial space over 8 floors and 384 car parking spaces in 3 levels of basement parking.
Waterman’s Dublin team (Waterman Moylan) has been appointed to provide civil, structural and transportation services to Green REIT plc for the development. The scheme already had a planning consent when Green acquired Central Park, so the initial brief was to develop a series of structural options that could be costed, to enable the identification of the most cost effective overall building solution for the project.
Our team used advanced modelling software, SCIA, to design the reinforced concrete frame of the building in line with Eurocode 2 rules. This analysis and design software links seamlessly with the Revit 3D modelling and drawing production software, permitting rapid assessment of alternatives and resulting in an optimised final design. The building model has been used by the project team to aid with scheduling for construction, and also as an aid to lighting design by the specialist lighting consultants.
The building is being designed to achieve a LEED Gold accreditation from the US Green Building Council. The LEED accreditation system has been gaining popularity in Ireland in the last couple of years with developers seemingly keen to design to this standard rather than BREEAM in order to attract blue-chip American companies.
Our building services team are acting as the LEED Commissioning Agent on the project. In this role we act as Client representatives to provide independent oversight of the mechanical and electrical building services design in order to ensure the Client brief is being met and to review how easily the system can be commissioned. Once on site the LEED Commissioning Agent implements a Commissioning Plan and monitors the testing, balancing and handover processes on behalf of the Client.
We are also very pleased to be working on a Planning Application for the adjacent Block I site. The preliminary design is being progressed and developed prior to the planning application being submitted. This proposed scheme will add a further 82,000ft2 of commercial space over 7 floors and an additional 159 car parking spaces in 2 levels of basement parking to the Central Park Campus once complete.
