Continental Frame

Bouygues Construction’s traditional use of continental frames to build its projects brings significant environmental advantages.

These advantages can be seen on Bouygues UK’s Pontoon Dock project in London (our three 14 storey residential towers).

The continental frame consists of concrete being used for most of the building’s walls including all of the facade walls and most of the internal walls, which allows for the installation of embedded services. This includes electrical sockets and conduits in the walls, mechanical pipes and boxes in the slabs, and electrical boxes in the slab for the flat below.

This resulted in removing all plasterboard dropped ceilings and screed in the flats. Due to those small height gains at each level, the overall height of the buildings were reduced from 15 storeys to 14 storeys.

At the level of the entire project, thanks to the use of the continental frame combined with the embedded services, less material has been used (one level gain on each of the three buildings):

• Reduction of dry-lining material, mainly plasterboard and plywood.
• Reduction of facade material, mainly bricks, mortar and insulation.
• Reduction of screed material including sand, cement and insulation.
• Reduction of all energy sources needed to build three more floors.