Creo Customer: Debenhams and the Tessellated Clamshell

By Geoff Hedges | Published: August 17, 2011

In 2009, Hopkins Architects unveiled the cornerstone of a new shopping development: The Debenham Department Store in Bury St. Edmund, Surrey, UK. As with all daring architecture, people weren’t sure what to think of it. Architects said the building was meant to look like a clamshell. Critics (and CAD designers will agree I’m sure) noticed it looked a bit tessellated. That’s because its smooth turban shape was composed of diamond-like panels broken up by glowing blue light.

Eventually, the rest of the project was completed, with surrounding buildings and plazas and, in context, the three-story Debenham Department Store looked smart, interesting, and contemporary. It has, in fact, become a landmark. But let’s talk more about those panels. Architects design what they will, but it’s companies like the CA Group that have to engineer that vision into bricks and mortar. Or, in this case, sand-cast aluminum. CA Group specializes in architectural cladding and says it believes this is the first time a building has used this approach to a façade. The cladding is composed of about 3000 different panels made up of 385 unique shapes.

“In order to create this amazing building,” says CA, “we needed to utilize our state-of-the-art 3D surfacing modelling software, similar to that used in the automotive and aerospace manufacturing industries. Architects work with very sophisticated CAD packages, and we needed to use a system that could accurately reproduce their designs and engineer complex forms and structures.” Which is a long way of saying “CA Group used Creo Parametric.” Get a look at CA Group’s work, as well as that of other Creo users in civil engineering, in this episode of The Product Design Show.