Viewpoint The Podium, York Road

The Podium, otherwise known as Viewpoint is located on York Road in Battersea, south London just minutes from the river Thames. The development by Linden Homes features communal gardens and is raised by a Volkswagon showroom elevating the apartments and providing distance between residents and the busy road below. The scheme was designed by GRID Architects and KSS Architects.

KSS’ contractor side role as architects to Linden Homes involved the delivery of the Employers Requirements prepared by GRID architects, and KSS paid special attention to ensure the external envelope materiality and brickwork detailing was commensurate with the original design intent.

Each apartment benefits from a private balcony or terrace giving residents much-needed outdoor space in this central location. The balconies arrived to site prefinished and ready for install, including the addition of spotlights neatly integrated into the soffits.

Challenge

A key challenge on this project was the tight site location which had no room for storage. As a result, materials on site needed to be kept to a minimum.

Viewpoint, The Podium, was also located in central London in a particularly high-traffic area. This meant logistics needed to be carefully considered so as not to disrupt the local area and ensure deliveries had easy access to site.

Solution

Due to the lack of storage space on-site, our offsite manufacture was instrumental to the smooth running of site activities. The balconies we prefinished offsite in our factory and securely stored well ahead of the agreed delivery date. This meant when the balconies were needed on-site they could be easily transported while our logistics team maintained close communication with those on-site.

According to the build manager, “the logistics were very good, they all arrived on time and on schedule and the lifting plan was very good”.
The speed of install was also very important to the site team due to the busy location of the site. The build manager was impressed by the speed and simplicity of the Glide-On™ system and commented: “the install was really good, in 1 day we did 27 balconies”.

Installation process

Step 1: Ancon anchors were cast into the slab

Step 2: Cassette® balconies were preassembled offsite, including the balustrades, decking & soffits.

Step 3: Cassette® balconies were transported with balconies ‘nested’ onto each pallet making transport both cost-effective & safe. Balconies were pre-slung offsite ready for installation upon arrival.

Step 4: Once lifted into position, the Cassettes® simply Glide-On™ to the pre-erected support arms, before completing the simple mechanical fixings and connecting the spotlights.