BDP’s dynamic fin façade design for Arle Court Transport Hub is one of Maple Façades’s most bespoke projects to date, featuring around 4,500 blades—including approximately 1,200 unique fins—to create a striking wave effect on the new multi-storey car park.
While Maple is no stranger to twisted fin designs, Arle Court’s façade design presented new challenges for our pre-construction team. The concept required rotated trapezoidal fins to achieve the impression of movement, adding complexity to the engineering process.
The façade design was developed from the ground up with a physical testing approach to achieving the bespoke blades. Cutting into the blades would have made the fin weaker and more likely to fail testing. At the same time, adding a secondary support structure behind the façade would have compromised the full dynamic effect, therefore we wanted the fins to attach directly to the steel framework.
Our task, then, was to find a way to strengthen the rotated fins without an additional support structure.
Initially, our plan was to use two separate blades welded together however the design failed during testing. When welded, aluminium is half as strong, as it is naturally a relatively soft metal and can be prone to deformation during welding.
To overcome this, our team decided to insert a small tube between the blades and create the rotation effect using ‘bow tie’ shaped fixings. In order to demonstrate how the design would work in reality, our pre-construction team created a series of 3D models, such as in the video below.