heritage & historic buildings special report
45
BUILDING PROJECTS
The answer was 400 kg per square metre. “And that’s not a
lot,” says Mr Davies. He adds: “Our main challenge was that the site surveys
we had were all old and we had to relate them back to a new grid. Some of the existing buildings were not even square to each other. “Opening up the old building was a big challenge and we
were passing a lot of info back to the consultants. There was a lot of exploratory work while we have been trying to build at the same time.” Due to this complicated nature of the interface between
the old frame and the new design, this produced a massive swathe of construction design portions (CDPs), which mean Kier take on board this element of the more detailed construction design. Kier estimate that the CDPs cover about a quarter of the
job. The CDPs ranged from a mechanical and electrical work such as security systems and rainwater harvesting to a louvred plant enclosure, cold rolled purlins and rails for cladding support. While Arup are structural engineers across the whole
project, with so many CDPs Kier employed a separate consult- ing engineer, Austin Partnership, to advise on this work. The new design will provide a new metal deck Bauder sys-
tem roof for the agricultural gallery, while a steel frame on the side of the existing building will provide a new space for the costume gallery plus a lecture theatre, toilets and better access. Gallery One will be subjected to a soft strip out and
refurbishment, while the old courtyard will be replaced by a new more distinct space in a striking part of Purcell Miller Tritton’s design. The old inside courtyard was wasted space and the design
The savings included reductions to the size of the car park
to reduced mechanical and electrical work and the main building will now cost around £14 million. For Kier, such a major retention job has provided
challenges, particularly when integrating this with the new design from Purcell Miller Tritton. With the architects’ design needing to work around the
listing, there is a mix of steel and concrete frames. On the new West Wing, there is a concrete frame to the first floor and a steel frame to the second floor. Working around the old design meant that one of the first
jobs when construction actually started was to carry out a fer- rous rebar scan to work out how much vertical and horizontal rebar was in the existing concrete frame to then calculate how much weight the frame would take.
for the new courtyard will bring this space into use with a steel portal frame, glazing panels and feature roof lights will provide the lighting. The design by Purcell Miller Tritton also included exposed
concrete as a nod to the original Percy Thomas building. The architects also specified a 25mm protrusion on the header bricks The original intention was to save some of the original
bricks to rebuild the inner courtyard, but the bed joints were too damp to make this possible. Instead, a Flemish bond brick was sourced from Germany from the same manufacturer specified by Percy Thomas. Some of the original bricks have also been saved for repairs and infills on the exterior after the masonry is cleaned up. Although there were two architects on the project, the rest
of the design and construction team was the same across the project. “There was a lot of overlaps on the design team,” says Kier’s design manager John Richards. Continued overleaf...
‘Our main challenge was that the site surveys
we had were all old and we had to relate them back to a new grid. Some of the existing buildings were not even square
to each other’ Ian Davies, project manager
www.architectsdatafile.co.uk
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