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Remaking London’s skyline: Ballymore uses digital building solutions on Wardian London [Sponsored content]

Irish developer Ballymore Group is building two towers near London’s Canary Wharf featuring wraparound balconies that create a vertical sky garden.

Irish developer Ballymore Group is building two towers near London’s Canary Wharf featuring wraparound balconies that create a vertical sky garden.

The development is called Wardian London, named after a Wardian case, which is a glass box meant to house ferns or other plants, invented by British botanist, explorer and inventor Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward.

The project will include the two towers, 55 and 50 stories and remake the skyline of Canary Wharf, with all of the 764 apartments featuring balconies and private gardens.

Ballymore will install around 4,000 balconies—40 per floor—when the towers open next year. This innovative design called for new technology solutions such as Bluebeam Revu, which allows for real-time information to be shared instantaneously between the field and office, and has shaved one day per week off the installation schedule thanks to tracking and collaboration capabilities.

Gibbs Burke and Clark Stirling, senior facades construction managers, oversee the progress of construction on the exterior. In this case, that means knowing where all 4,000 balconies are in terms of instalment.

“Revu helps tremendously,” Burke explains. “It allows us to track in real time exactly what’s going on for any given balcony.”

The markup capabilities mean that if the target installation number wasn’t met on a certain day, Burke, Stirling and the Ballymore team will know why. This allows them to make adjustments over the life of a project.

This data will be useful after turnover, as Ballymore can analyse data across projects to improve efficiency going forward. With such precise information, Ballymore knows if they fall behind and what they have to do to make up time.

When the project is nearing completion, they use Revu for defect inspections: a process that used to take a day and a half, but with Revu now takes an hour.

According to Burke and Stirling, defect inspections in Revu are incredibly easy: just a “simple point, click, take a picture, done.” They can have a full report done and uploaded to Revu so that the office can see it in just 60 minutes, or the time it takes to do a walk through.

Knowing that his team is using Revu gives Senior Packages Manager Mark Burnett comfort as well. “I know that my team is looking at the construction on a day-to-day basis, and I know that they will know if part of the building is not built on that day, so they can react to that,” he said.

Revu has also played an important role in driving innovations forward and improving efficiency on Wardian London. “Being efficient makes people happier,” Terry Arnold, the Wardian project director, said. “We’ll definitely be using Revu on the next project. And we’re looking to roll it out across the whole of Ballymore.”

Click here to learn more about Bluebeam Revu.

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