Designing and delivering ‘The Cube' mixed-use building in Birmingham, UK

‘The Cube' is an iconic new mixed-used building in the Mailbox development in central Birmingham, UK. Its competition-winning design provided a pragmatic approach to maximising the use of the site but also required a number of complex engineering details to be resolved. This required collaboration between all parties at all stages of the project, making full use of an integrated site office. This paper provides an overview of the project, then describes in greater detail the challenges associated with two of the more complex areas – the large basement construction, containing one of the biggest automated car parking systems in the UK, and the open, irregularly patterned facade structure.