Museum of Liverpool
Buro Happold
1 / Introduction
Opened to the public in 2011, the Museum of Liverpool is one of the world’s leading city history museums and the largest newly created national museum in the UK for over a hundred years. Situated alongside the Three Graces in Liverpool’s historic waterfront setting, it will showcase Liverpool’s social history and popular culture while setting a global benchmark for other museums of its kind.
Visible from both the river and city on this UNESCO World Heritage Site, the building is a striking example of contemporary, stylish Scandinavian design as well as being an outstanding example of integrated structural and environmental engineering systems.
The project was won by 3XN Architects and Buro Happold in an architectural design competition in the autumn of 2004, and construction commenced in 2006 on site. The winning design was for a three storey building which is divided into a number of public access galleries and circulation spaces, and private back of house spaces. Public access to the building is available at both ground floor and first floor levels. The back of house spaces contain the staff accommodation, loading bay, storage and plant rooms.
With large 10m high gallery spaces, 9m cantilevers and over 8,000m² of exhibition space, the project has presented complex engineering challenges. The design provides an integrated engineering approach, allowing the structure and the services design solutions to combine and produce an energy efficient, low carbon solution to meet the high aesthetic demands of the architecture.
The Mersey Railway Tunnel passes directly below the site and the Queensway road tunnel passes under the River Mersey approximately 100m north of the site, providing additional site challenges. The site is reasonably level, the ground level being around +6.5m OD (Ordnance Datum).
The building shell and core is complete and was successfully handed over – on time and budget – in January 2010.
Key facts
- Steel frame on 9m grid
- Large spiral stair case
- Jura limestone rainscreen
- BREEAM Very Good rated
- Integrated building management systems
Related Disciplines
The Project Details
Client: National Museums Liverpool
Architect: 3XN
Project value: £45million
Buro Happold services: Structural engineering, building services engineering, civil engineering, ground engineering, fire engineering, acoustics and lighting consultancy, asset management, computational simulation and analysis
