North Building Technologies

The Building

Highcross shopping centre is the largest regeneration project ever undertaken in the city. The building itself is of some significance. The new John Lewis store has been designed by Foreign Office Architects. The entire building is encased in a double-layered glass skin with a cool white filigree pattern applied to both layers, reflecting Leicester’s rich history of hosiery and fabric manufacture. Facing the main ground level entrance to John Lewis there’s a new two-level retail mall designed by international firm, Chapman Taylor Architects. Here, contemporary materials, stone flooring, and high levels of natural lighting and ventilation, combine to create the atmosphere of a wide covered street. Directly above the main mall entrance, a double-height glass footbridge provides a spectacular suspended link to John Lewis as well as to the multi-storey car park.

Integrated Controls Philosophy

Working to an intelligent buildings specification from WSP Intelligent Building Group, M+E contractors Sir Robert McAlpine let contracts for each of the building services disciplines with one common element: Every system within the building would able to integrate fully, via serial or IP protocol to the buildings integration system. This involved each system manufacturer releasing their full protocol documentation at tender stage, to ensure that interfaces could be developed onto any system selected.

Systems integrated included:

• Fire Detection (Protec)
• CCTV (Pelco)
• HVAC controls (Cylon)
• Car park control and payment systems (SkiData)
• Energy meters (Various Modbus and M-Bus)
• Door Access (Grosvenor Janus)
• Smoke Dampers (Colt)

The integration provides many advanced functions. North's WebView product is serving data onto the sites IP backbone as HTML pages. Engineers and managers can take full control of any system via the web interface. North products are providing site-wide cause and effect strategies to offer full interoperability between all disciplines. For example, a North Integrator is communicating with the fire panel via RS232 and using XML over TCP/IP to control the CCTV system; such that a camera is automatically moved to a particular fire zone if a break glass or smoke head is activated.

The site is now handed over and has been running since June 2008, without issue. much of the credit for the successful deployment of this large integration project goes to Sir Robert McAplines on site team. They ensured that all parties, from fire panels manufacturers, to car park barrier suppliers bought into the project at a very early stage. Bi-weekly site meetings ensured that driver developments were all going to schedule and that any information required by North from third parties was made available swiftly.

Its fair to say, we are quite proud of this project, the specification from WSP, Management from Sir Robert McAlpines’, buy-in from the manufacturers, engineering from Intelligent Controls and Robell and hard work in the back-ground by our software engineers made for a site which can truly boast full integration across ALL building services. Not many sites can truly make that claim.

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