The firms that designed and built The Place were no strangers to each other. They had cut their teeth on the 17-story office building's 306-meter-tall neighbor, The Shard, which was named the Best Large Project of ENR's 2013 Global Best Projects contest (ENR 6/3/13 p. 51).
The building-team familiarity bred good work. For example, for the 40,000-sq-m Place, the team used a variation of a top-down construction strategy that had been successfully implemented on The Shard. For The Place, the approach allowed workers to construct both concrete cores, the entire steel superstructure and many of the concrete floor plates before completion of the substructure. The final superstructure was placed within one week of the mat, which cut six months off the schedule.