The Project
One Airport Square is a mixed-use building located in the growing commercial area of Airport City, inside the development area of the international airport of Accra, Kotoka. It is a nine-storey building for offices, plus a ground floor designed for commercial activities, for a total of about 17,000 square meters.
The building envelope is the key element that demonstrates the integration between form, structure and environmental strategies. It is made up of one system of overhanging terraces protecting the building from solar radiation, one rear sun-protected glass facade, and a reinforced concrete structure enveloping the building in a holistic manner.
The three-dimensional concrete grid features both architecture and engineering, while providing thermal mass support essential for a building located in Equatorial Africa. Complexity of all these structures has inevitably required complex tools as the BIM modeling software that enabled to optimize the management of information during on-site design and construction, balancing the most advanced technologies of value engineering with the local tradition.
Furthermore, much technological aesthetic virtuosity was used: 61 double-pendulum vibration isolators, 30 sliding bearings located on the perimeter edge wall of the ground floor, more than 3,000 continuous mechanical systems and end anchors of steel bars in concrete. The strength and uniqueness of One Airport Square are not its exceptional “numbers”, but the management of the disciplinary synergies to get the maximum sustainability of the building while respecting the specific manifold local setting – a project that celebrates the city of Accra, that is in turn symbol of innovation and economic growth of the whole Region.
One Airport Square is the first commercial building in Ghana to obtain the 4-Stars (Design Stage) by the Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA).