The Chadstone Shopping Centre is the largest center of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, and now it has only grown larger with the opening of its most recent $660 million expansion. But it isn’t the size of the expansion that stands out, it’s the striking 7,080-sm steel and glass roof.
CallisonRTKL designed the expansion and seele provided its services for the design and construction of the roof. There are two key features focused on for the expansion’s design; its open style with a gallery-type second floor, and the high, dome-like glass roof that allows a flood of daylight to reach both floors.
Because the glass roof had to follow the path of the shopping mall below, it turned into a complex free-form grid with spans of up to 44 meters, according to seele’s website. The 44-meter spans aren’t the only impressive numbers associated with the glass roof, though. The 140-meter long roof has 2,672 ISO insulating glass panes, 500 tons of steelwork, 2,810 steel nodes, and 95% of its trapezoidal forms that are unique.
The steel components of the roof were assembled off-site, checked for dimensional accuracy, and then shipped to the build site. Some of the preassembled frames measured up to 18 meters long and 5.5 meters wide.
The final product was a striking, light-filled expansion.
Rendering courtesy of seele
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