June 24, 2004
Engineering Design Challenges at Tanaka Business School
Imperial College’s new landmark entrance building to the Tanaka Business School in London, South Kensington’s Exhibition Road, designed by a team including architect Foster and Partners and engineers Buro Happold, was officially opened today, Thursday June 24, by Her Majesty the Queen and His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh.
The £26 million building costs have been met by noted technology investor and alumnus Dr Gary Tanaka.
“Buro Happold is delighted to have provided structural, building services, civil and IT consultancy services for the Tanaka Business School project, which called for the practice to apply a number of creative engineering solutions and integrate them within the architecture of this challenging space. Key technical challenges included engineering the new atrium against an existing building, providing a comfortable environment with a minimum energy consumption as well as a state-of-the-art, future-ready IT network to enhance the learning environment. All these goals we successfully achieved through the skilled use of computer simulation techniques, understanding the building’s behaviour and users’ comfort needs in terms of warmth, light and equipment provision,” said Buro Happold’s project leader, Ian Maddocks.
Structural engineering challenges were met by Buro Happold’s innovative technical solutions including the investigation of the existing site and previous buildings to find a best value scheme re-using some of the existing piles, assessing the behaviour of the building to determine the suitability and method for supporting the new, primary roof beams and rooftop plant areas. Buro Happold also worked closely with Foster and Partners and the facade designers to create the elegant glass atrium which fronts Exhibition Road.Six lecture theatres are arranged into a striking, stainless steel clad drum shaped tower rising from the lower ground floor, which is constructed from cast in situ reinforced concrete. The floor plates are flat slab with downstand edge beams and columns shaped to follow the circular plan of the lecture rooms. The lecture tower is enclosed in an ETFE foil cushion and glass atrium.
The steel roof structure, which is also clad with inflated ETFE foil cushions, acts as a Vierendeel frame tied to the existing Mechanical and Engineering Building and Black Tower to transfer transverse wind loads for overall stability.
“With the creation of an atrium in front of existing naturally ventilated offices clearly careful consideration needed to be given to safeguard the environment within these spaces” said Peter Roberts, building services team leader. Balancing this imperative with the low energy aspirations of the atrium became a clear driver for the building services design. The environment within the atrium is optimised to ensure that temperatures outside the office windows do not exceed peak summertime temperatures and daylight levels were modelled to ensure that they do not fall below recommended levels. The lessons learnt from these models were fed back into the design and used to optimise the performance of the atrium’s ETFE foil cushions and the glazed façade.
Additionally, because both Buro Happold and Imperial College place energy management at the centre of their policies, Buro Happold adopted an energy efficient, absorption cooling strategy to meet the Business Schools base cooling load. A more economic electric chiller is used to “top up” the cooling duty under peak conditions. As the absorption chiller utilises waste heat from the College’s energy centre, Buro Happold’s strategy seeks to optimise its operation to reduce the College’s electrical consumption and foreshorten the period taken for absorption unit to “payback”.
The atrium is conditioned by a combined displacement ventilation and underfloor strategy, which aims to reduce energy consumption by maintaining comfort condition in the 2.5m zone above floor level and relaxing conditions outside this zone. A displacement ventilation strategy is combined with underfloor heating in the winter and underfloor cooling to the occupied zone in the summer. In spring and autumn the space is naturally ventilated to reduce the energy consumption. A Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) model was developed to optimise the thermal performance of this space.
Buro Happold also advised Tanaka Business School about its information technology (IT) and audio visual (AV) provision. Here the challenge for Buro Happold was to find a solution that suited traditional “show and tell” teaching methods and one that was highly interactive and media rich. The chosen approach was to deploy systems that delivered an appropriate level of functionality rather than technology wizardry, yet which are also future-ready, and that are familiar and easy for lecturing staff to use.
All IT cabling throughout the atrium and lower ground floor had to be discrete in order to reflect the clean and minimal architectural ethos for the space.
A high speed, high bandwidth fibre optic network enables Internet connectivity and fast delivery of graphics intensive applications to the lecture theatres, and although the use of wireless was considered the final option favoured a hybrid combination of wired and wireless connectivity.
Email and electronic Information Points, intended for quick, occasional use, are located in the entrance area. The reception’s desktop PC screen doubles after normal College hours as a CCTV monitor, which is operated by the click of a discrete switch located under the desk and connected back to the College’s main security desk, so making effective use of the existing campus infrastructure.
Background information for editors:
Buro Happold is a multi-disciplinary international practice of consulting engineers established in 1976 offering civil and structural engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering, quantity surveying, building services and environmental engineering, health and safety management, infrastructure and traffic engineering, ground engineering, façade engineering, fire engineering, computational fluid dynamics analysis, disability design consultancy, project management, urban design and a range of specialist CAD services.
Elspeth Wales
Telephone 01225 320 600
Fax 0870 787 4148
Email:Elspeth.Wales@burohappold.com Elspeth.Wales@burohappold.com
