AURORA TOWER BELFAST

Belfast - Ireland

This residential tower design is intended to be affordable and of high quality. Chris Bakkala assembled and led the multidisciplinary engineering team.

He did this at Buro Happold, which worked in support of the architectural design by HKR to make the engineering case for sustainable high rise design of this 37 storey residential development in the centre of Belfast. The engineering planning team included structural, mechanical, electrical, facade and fire engineering.

Of particular note are high quality, low cost wet heating systems using “energy centers” or small heat exchange units located on the residential floors providing domestic hot water and heat using a central gas-fired boiler. The fire strategy utilized NFPA (USA) criteria to justify the single egress stair for the 37 storey tower, a stair configuration which would be considered highly unusual for such a tall building outside of the UK and Ireland.

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