The Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One Team has recently broken ground on a new headquarters in Northamptonshire, England. The project, which represents the first all-new F1 factory in the UK since the McLaren Technology Centre opened in 2004, is being designed by Ridge and Partners LLP.
The project will span 400,000 sf across multiple buildings, including a factory and a wind tunnel. The three-unit factory will be built just across the street from the Silverstone Grand Prix Circuit. One building will house the team’s design, manufacturing and marketing resource; a second building will be occupied by the new wind tunnel; and the third will redevelop and repurpose the existing factory premises as a central hub with staff amenities and a logistics center. The new headquarters will house every manufacturing resource within a single campus for the first time in Aston Martin’s history.
The new wind tunnel will use the latest steel-belt rolling-road system and a state-of-the-art flow-imaging section area. The site will incorporate the wind tunnel, model support, and production facilities. The commissioning of the wind tunnel is due to start in Q3 2023.
The project also claims to be the first “smart factory” in Formula One. It has been designed from the ground-up to be a wireless, adaptive, streamlined facility with all of its information streams, monitoring systems, and manufacturing processes tied together via data in the cloud. The technology will give the headquarters the ability to constantly adapt to the cyclical manufacturing processes of a Formula One team.
The new headquarters is slated for completion in late 2022 or early 2023.
Related Stories
| Nov 27, 2013
Wonder walls: 13 choices for the building envelope
BD+C editors present a roundup of the latest technologies and applications in exterior wall systems, from a tapered metal wall installation in Oklahoma to a textured precast concrete solution in North Carolina.
| Nov 26, 2013
Video: Zaha Hadid's stadium for Qatar 2022 World Cup
Zaha Hadid Architects, in conjunction with AECOM, has released renderings for a major stadium being designed for the Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup--an event that will involve up to nine stadiums.
| Nov 26, 2013
Construction costs rise for 22nd straight month in November
Construction costs in North America rose for the 22nd consecutive month in November as labor costs continued to increase, amid growing industry concern over the tight availability of skilled workers.
| Nov 25, 2013
Building Teams need to help owners avoid 'operational stray'
"Operational stray" occurs when a building’s MEP systems don’t work the way they should. Even the most well-designed and constructed building can stray from perfection—and that can cost the owner a ton in unnecessary utility costs. But help is on the way.
| Nov 19, 2013
Top 10 green building products for 2014
Assa Abloy's power-over-ethernet access-control locks and Schüco's retrofit façade system are among the products to make BuildingGreen Inc.'s annual Top-10 Green Building Products list.
| Nov 13, 2013
Installed capacity of geothermal heat pumps to grow by 150% by 2020, says study
The worldwide installed capacity of GHP systems will reach 127.4 gigawatts-thermal over the next seven years, growth of nearly 150%, according to a recent report from Navigant Research.
| Nov 7, 2013
Fitness center design: What do higher-ed students want?
Campus fitness centers are taking their place alongside student centers, science centers, and libraries as hallmark components of a student-life experience. Here are some tips for identifying the ideal design features for your next higher-ed fitness center project.
| Oct 30, 2013
11 hot BIM/VDC topics for 2013
If you like to geek out on building information modeling and virtual design and construction, you should enjoy this overview of the top BIM/VDC topics.
| Oct 28, 2013
Urban growth doesn’t have to destroy nature—it can work with it
Our collective desire to live in cities has never been stronger. According to the World Health Organization, 60% of the world’s population will live in a city by 2030. As urban populations swell, what people demand from their cities is evolving.
| Oct 18, 2013
Researchers discover tension-fusing properties of metal
When a group of MIT researchers recently discovered that stress can cause metal alloy to fuse rather than break apart, they assumed it must be a mistake. It wasn't. The surprising finding could lead to self-healing materials that repair early damage before it has a chance to spread.
