Afrex House

Alperton, London

Client: Egg Limited

Architect: Egg Limited

Sector: Residential

Feature: Substructure

Status: Built

Afrex House is a completed residential development in Alperton, north-west London, adjacent to the Grand Union Canal.

Architectural visualisation of Afrex House, a brick residential development beside a tree-lined street in Alperton.
Afrex House viewed from the street in Alperton.

The scheme proposed the demolition of an existing industrial building, previously used as a vehicle repair workshop, and replacing it with a building ranging from three to five storeys.

The development comprises 31 apartments, including 9 one-bedroom, 18 two-bedroom homes, and 4 three-bedroom homes.

Agentia joined the project after it had faced significant difficulties during delivery, with the developer and several members of the design team going into administration. The building frame was originally designed by another engineer, but Agentia independently redesigned the entire building and assumed responsibility for the design.

hree-dimensional view of a branching concrete structure with multiple floor and roof slabs, vertical piles, dark diagonal framing and orange projecting panels along the floor edges.
Building-wide structure from piled foundations to upper floors.

A series of intrusive survey holes and ferro-scanning surveys were commissioned where access was readily available. The results were compared with the drawn information to establish confidence that the drawings reflected the as-built condition.

Three-dimensional finite-element analysis model showing coloured stress contours across five floor slabs.
Finite-element analysis of the floor slabs.
Three-dimensional whole-building analysis model showing floor plates, columns and core walls.
Whole-building frame analysis showing slabs, columns and stability walls.

The design was verified through a combination of hand calculations, local frame analysis and global whole-building finite-element frame analysis in Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis. A fully independent analysis was also carried out, with its reinforcement requirements compared against the construction issue reinforcement drawings.