“what were your results?”
11
BUILDING PROJECTS
The main players in prefabrication suitable for schools
include Laing O’ Rourke, and its concrete system, cross-lami- nated timber (CLT) providers, such as B&K Structures, and whole-school solutions like Willmott Dixon’s Sunesis. We work most often with Yorkon for the system and then
employ high-quality finishes. Modular prefab can be highly adaptable if used properly. Finishes don’t have to be boring, but they must be practical.
We are particularly keen on Parklex, a timber-veneer cladding used on George Spicer Primary School in Enfield to create a grained effect. We employed colourful and syncopated Trespa rainscreen cladding for City Farm School, Barking and Dagenham and All Saints, Croydon. We also use floor-to-ceiling glazing and bricks – although
even the latter are becoming expensive. At the moment, we are investigating Rodeca’s colourful
translucent material used on the Laban. But today’s school clients can’t afford to be into innovation in materials – they will only approve something which has been used 10 times before, having learnt from the mistakes of the past. All in all, I think schools – with the development of pre-
fabrication techniques which have been used in Scandinavia for many years – are a very exciting sector to be in. It’s where progress is being made...”
Lee Fordham, Associate Architype Architects Learning from Passivhaus for airtight envelopes
“Under BSF we built several schools better than Passivhaus (PH) standards, with air tightness levels below 0.3 air changes per hour at 50 Pascals pressure – the PH requirement being 0.6. We started at prices over £2,000 a sq m and managed to reduce costs to £1,800 then £1,700, and we were making further progress. But there is no way we could have got down to £1,100! Nonetheless, we have managed to learn lessons from our work
in order to maintain air tightness at around 3 with a target of 5, while keeping within the EFA funding requirements. That’s better than half Building Regulations’ requirements of 10. We maintain just one airtightness line through the build- ing – in other words, the insulation is continuous. It makes it
Continued overleaf... respond online at
www.architectsdatafile.co.uk
‘The building envelope is likely to consume the largest cost of a school (19.3 per cent according to the US’ National Institute of Building Sciences)’
Cambourne College, Yorkon
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