Considering Design Fit for Purpose

Whether you’re developing a residential or commercial build, its architectural and structural design play a key part in making sure your building is fit for its purpose. You can work with architecture companies, who are experts in considering this, to ensure your building is built with such thoughts in mind.

We’ve given examples below of some different building structures and how they are designed to be fit for purpose.

Office Block

Parking Spaces: When drawing up the blueprints for an office block, an allowance of the site’s square footage may be kept for parking spaces for employees who commute to work via car. This won’t limit the office spaces themselves too much, since you can still build up.

Multiple Stories: Office buildings often tend to be tall, multi-story spaces. You may think ‘surely one company doesn’t need that many offices?’ Well, some larger companies may do, but this tends to be done so multiple companies can be based in the same building, having their offices on separate floors to distinguish themselves from one another.

Windows: For the wellbeing of employees who work in offices, natural lighting is vital. It is for this reason that office blocks are built with a multitude of windows on all sides. This also brightens the space and offers ventilation, lowering the reliance and costs of artificial lighting and air conditioning when electricity costs will already be in abundance to power the internet and computers.

Multi-Story Car Park

Varied Ceiling Heights: To accommodate all kinds of vehicles, multi-story car parks tend to have varied ceiling heights. Ceilings may be taller on the lowest level(s) to allow for vans or minibuses to use the car park, then there is often a height restriction moving up to higher levels that are only suitable for cars. By lowering the ceiling heights where possible, more levels are able to be built, ultimately allowing for more spaces.

Accessibility: People don’t usually stay in their cars once they’ve parked up; rather, they move on to their final destination by foot. If you’re parked on the very top level, you won’t want to take the stairs to the very bottom on foot, or perhaps you’re in a wheelchair and simply cannot. For this reason, lifts are key features of multi-story car parks.

Entrance/Exit: Where the entrance and exit of a multi-story car park are situated play a key part in their design. Having them located by a main road rather than down a narrow lane that people would have to go out of their way to get to allows for better accessibility and less congestion.

Shopping Centre

Circular Design: The vast majority of shopping centres are built to be circular. This is a clever design trick used to encourage people to stay for longer and visit more shops. By creating cyclical walkways, visitors are more likely to feel disorientated in their sense of direction, prompting them to wander for longer - especially when there are multiple exits.

Glass Roof: A lot of shopping centres are built with roofs made of glass. The reason behind this is because it simultaneously allows for shelter from the weather and an abundance of natural light to brighten up the space - which is why a lot of their roofs tend to be domed as well!

Do you require architectural services for a new building project? Contact Integrated Designs & Associates. Offering project management in Birmingham to assist you throughout your building development, we have over 27 years of experience to provide you with the quality services you deserve.