building for education special report
‘The building will be one of the UK’s largest Passivhaus projects to date’
challenge as local quarries were uncertain how much was available. In another pioneering usage, the canopy’s soffit and south
facing wall use medite tricoya a wood grade MDF not previously used at this scale. UEA was keen to have a durable roof, so a traditional felt
one was chosen with in situ thatch on the light wells that break it up. Most of the roof is covered with photovoltaics. Mechanical ventilation allows air in where needed, but the
building relies largely on natural heat and ventilation and heating is minimal. In very cold conditions radiators of some 450 x 250mm heat rooms some 30 square metres. A fixed brise soleil has been designed to deflect sun at both
summer and winter angles. It was important throughout the process to work closely
with UEA’s teachers, management and maintenance staff and students and the ‘soft landings’ approach was used with meetings of up to 70 people giving their opinions. “Such meetings can be unwieldy but we found these
incredible useful drawing on people with considerable experience of operating buildings for teaching,” Humphries says. “Soft landings means we will stay involved through
completion and handover to ensure everything works.” The building will be one of the UK’s largest Passivhaus
projects to date. Humphries says: “In Germany they have done buildings of
this size for years so it's not a big deal really, though issue like heat gain are more complicated in a multi-occupancy building where everyone has to be aware of how to use it. Passivhaus also posed a construction challenge. Morgan
Sindall’s contract manager Steve Brock says: “The attention to detail was the big difference. “We always attend to detail of course, but the big thing here
was getting the supply chain used to the idea that if something went wrong, like they put a hole in a wall, they should tell us and we’d put it right at that stage, you do not want to have fix things later on with this.” Using the concrete slab rather than timber floor altered the
initial calculations but the building is recorded as using 443 kg CO2 per square metre over 100 years, a quantity Humphries says is about one quarter that of a conventional structure. It secured a rating of 90.8 for the BREEAM ‘outstanding’
category at its design stage and aims for 92.8 for the construction stage. While the Passivhaus standard is 0.6 air changes per hour at
50 Pascal, the Enterprise Centre has this down to 0.21. Humphries believes that as technology and techniques
©DennisGilbert/VIEW
improve for low carbon building so the industry will have to face the issue of embodied carbon in its materials. “I think this building will hopefully be a catalyst and spur others to consider the materials we have,” he concludes.
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