21ST-CENTURY DESIGN
Three Bathbuilding projects ‘virtually enabled’
Integral Engineering Design has worked alongside the Royal United Hospitals (RUH) NHS Foundation Trust in Bath on three new building projects over the past five years. Claire Thomas, a director at Integral, explains how Building Information Modelling (BIM) and 3D modelling (‘a kind of Virtual Reality’) have played a central role in the design of the buildings above ground, and, increasingly, also with the enabling works that are required when developing an existing hospital site. This technology also uses 3D scanning techniques to identify and evaluate site constraints. ‘Whole projects are being planned, designed, coordinated, and built, in a virtual environment before construction’.
The Royal United Hospital opened on its present site in Combe Park, Bath in December 1932, and over the decades has significantly grown and developed. It survived the war, and saw the birth of the National Health Service in 1948, which heralded a period of expansion, including departments from elsewhere in Bath. The Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital relocated to the RUH in 1959, followed by the Eye Infirmary in 1973.
This organic redevelopment, combined with the complex servicing arrangements required of a major healthcare provider, make constructing new buildings quite a challenge. The Trust’s ambitious masterplan for the next decades requires a significant amount of existing accommodation to be decanted and demolished to allow for the creation of state-of-the art new facilities, including a pharmacy, therapies centre, and cancer centre. This has meant a reorganisation of site-wide services, particularly below ground, and naturally to keep the hospital site ‘live’ at all times.
The RUH is no stranger to 3D modelling, and was already ‘ahead of the curve’ in having commissioned its own model of the existing hospital buildings in Revit. Using this, and the designers’ emerging models of the new buildings, helped to visualise the decant and demolition strategy and interfaces between proposed and existing.
New pharmacy
In 2015 Integral Engineering Design was appointed civil and structural engineering consultant to Kier, alongside architect, IBI, for the design and build of a new pharmacy building. This would allow the freeing up of the space occupied by the existing pharmacy building, which is located on a prime site adjacent to the hospital entrance, so it could be demolished and replaced by a new Therapies building. For this first project,
A 3D visualisation of the space for the dispensing robot.
we modelled just the building structure and foundations. The building needed to accommodate highly specialised equipment and laboratory spaces for making drugs, including radio isotopes. The building fabric had to achieve high
‘‘
The RUH is no stranger to 3D modelling, and was already ‘ahead of the curve’ in having commissioned its own model of the existing hospital buildings in Revit
density in some areas to limit radiation transmission, which was achieved through concrete plank floor construction and blockwork partition walls. Having a 3D model to scrutinise was far more informative when coordinating the spaces required for the aseptic suite and for the dispensing robot – a room-sized machine which stores and dispenses all the incoming drugs to the hospital.
RNHRD & Brownsword Therapies Centre
Once the new pharmacy building was in use, the site of the old pharmacy and adjacent parking area became free for the new Therapies Building. Building on lessons learned from the pharmacy, the building design progressed using Revit to model all of the building structure (this time a concrete frame), services, and architecture, but Integral and Kier were
October 2019 Health Estate Journal 101
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