The Elements is a £90 million extension to the Almondvale Shopping Center in Livingston, Scotland, consisting of six new buildings linked by a high-quality mall covered by a lightweight EFTE free form fabric roof. The biggest challenge was to produce a large amount of accurate production information on a very tight timescale so on-site work and steelwork fabrication could commence.

Arup used Bentley Structural mainly for its ability to link with Bentley’s RAM Structural System, which allowed Arup to go straight from analysis models to 3D Bentley Structural models. As the majority of the buildings had already been modeled by Arup’s London office, the design team converted these structural models into Bentley Structural models using the SNDF import option.