The name of our striking 12-storey office block being built in Salford has been revealed as Eden, an appropriate name for a building that will be covered entirely by a living, breathing façade.
The ambitious flagship development is being developed by The English Cities Fund, a joint venture between urban regenerator Muse Developments, Legal & General and Homes England.
Eden, a 115,000 square foot development will feature Europe’s biggest living wall – a stunning array of plants, insect hotels and bird nesting boxes. It will be built to the UK Green Building Council’s 2035-2050 Design for Performance standard and is set for completion in 2023.
The scheme is planned to be a 5.5-star NABERS UK scheme, the first of its kind in the UK.
Eden is the latest office building being delivered in Salford by the ECF development partnership, and forms part of the wider £1bn Salford Central masterplan, being delivered by the partnership.
The building will feature enhanced, demand-controlled ventilation with CO2 monitoring, and will be fossil fuel free with air source heat pumps generating heating, cooling and hot water.
Phil Marsden, Project Director at Muse Developments, said:
“We’ve accumulated a huge amount of knowledge over the past 18 months of how to extract the maximum from technology and resources for sustainability purposes. We have worked very hard to reduce the embodied carbon in construction and have analysed every aspect of the build. By making some innovative changes to a typical building structure, in terms of design and materials, we are on target to achieve an embodied carbon level of 700kg/co2e/m2 which is exceptional for a commercial building of this scale.
“Eden is designed to be net zero carbon in operation, achieving the UKGBC interim energy intensity targets for operational energy – and this is where we believe Eden will have another advantage: some building projects in design stages which have suddenly changed focus to become more carbon-efficient have struggled to find the resource to go carbon-efficient in both constructing and operating those buildings. It’s vital that these requirements are embedded into the brief from the very start.
“But this is not just about carbon – we have also thought hard about increasing biodiversity, and we have Europe’s biggest living wall – with the overwhelming majority of the non-glazed elements of the façade to be covered by 350,000 plants. The living wall provides real environmental benefits by removing toxins from the atmosphere, creating a significant increase in bio-diversity, providing habitat for birds, butterflies and pollinators, and also improves the thermal performance of the building.
“We are all contributors to change for the better, and we each have to start somewhere: Eden is as apt a name as any to describe both a start and a target for a more sustainable future,” said Phil Marsden.
