Belgrove House

Belgrove House, in Camden’s Knowledge Quarter, is a proposed life-sciences office and laboratory building on Euston Road, opposite King’s Cross and St. Pancras. Designed to complement the historic surroundings, it features research labs on floors 1-3, HQ offices on floors 5-9, and a collaboration hub in between.

We carried out a detailed analysis considering the design requests as expressed by AHHM, FMDC and Atelier10 with regard to glazing, shading, ventilation strategies, performance, etc. We focused on 4 issues:

• Properly model the Double Skin Façade systems in our Dynamic Thermal modelling tools,

• Advise on glazing and shading with increased transparency and enhanced performance,

• Identify potential bottlenecks and raise performance “flags” and

• Suggest further issues to be considered.

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Shading use and real-life daylight

We discussed how the system can be properly tuned in order to avoid using the shading too often with impact on views out and real-life daylight. Essential to avoid over-using shading is to account for the shading benefit of the plants in the DSF cavity by increasing the threshold accordingly. If we don’t account for the plants’ shading effect, we’ll overuse shading, unnecessarily decreasing real-life daylight levels and views out.