This project comprised the provision of a five-storey, 2,350m2 landmark building in the centre of the college campus intended to act as the main reception for the college as well as providing office accommodation for registry, finance, executives, board room, 3 large studio spaces, 4 No seminar rooms, a IT server room, lecture theatre, archive storage, a number of smaller meeting rooms and ancillary spaces all developed around an atrium with vertical transport and toilet facilities on 1st and 2nd floor levels over a ground floor circulation and gallery space.
A fully detailed design with site visit duties was undertaken by Worldwise Limited. After detailed analysis of the building’s thermal performance a natural ventilation strategy was decided upon for the majority of the building spaces. This employs the atrium as the “lungs” of the building. A BMS system, with sensors at each level of the atrium detecting both temperature and CO2 levels, controls opening lights on ground and 3rd floor levels to maintain temperature and CO2 levels within comfort bands dependent on external wind speed and rain.
The main studios and seminar rooms use manually operated cross-ventilation via window-type panels to achieve comfortable conditions when practicable. These are supplemented with VRV heat pumps employing ceiling-mounted cassette units when internal conditions cannot be maintained within comfort levels by the natural ventilation system alone.
Heating is effected using condensing boilers and a LPHW distribution system serving underfloor heating in the atrium and radiators elsewhere. A constant temperature circuit provides heat to an air handling unit dedicated to the 144 person lecture theatre that occupies the basement and ground floor southern side of the building. The CT circuit also supplements the domestic hot water system’s primary circuit for the building which uses a solar thermal system as its principal heat source.
The IT server room has dedicated run-and-standby cooling-only DX units to maintain temperatures within tolerable levels. This was viewed as critical for the main site servers that are linked to other servers on the campus via fibre optic rings for resilience.
The large glazed areas of the façade provide good daylighting to most areas. Advantage is taken of this by the adoption of automatic lighting controls with sensors responding to both ambient light levels and presence detection.
After a load analysis of the site’s power demands was undertaken; it was decided to provide a 350kVA sub-station to feed the Phase 4 building and to enable some load to be shed from the existing northern sub-station by diverting the supply to the adjacent Enterprise Pavilion to the new sub-station. This sub-station also offers expandability for future developments on the campus.
This development provided an opportunity for improving the site’s fire and intruder alarm systems, upgrading them to current standards, by installing control panels within the Phase 4 building with capacity for the future phased upgrade of the rest of the campus on a zoned basis. Reports were produced identifying a strategic programme for these works to be undertaken over the next five years.
Extensive structured cabling was installed to provide flexibility within the building for IT and telephony on a fibre optic backbone.
The Lecture Theatre includes a scene setting lighting control system, audio system, video display and television connections and facilities for Pod Casts across the Institute’s intranet.
