TECH & SERVICES - LONDON SITE VISIT
On Friday 27th Feb we went to London to look at 5 Pancras Square, the new BREEAM 'Outstanding' Headquarters for the London Borough of Camden.
We was very lucky to have one of the main designers of this building from Bennett Associates to give us a tour of the building, but more importantly he explained to us in detail how the building achieved a BREEAM 'Outstanding' rating.
This was kindly and strategically organized by our design tutor because we are at the moment in the midst of specifying ventilation and environmental strategies for our current design project with the Vulcan Works in Northampton.
This was a very relevant site visit and I definately learned a lot. I think they have succeeded in making this an efficient dynamic structure. Aesthetically speaking I think it does look good for its purpose however it's no Zaha Hadid... Needless to say it is the design of the building management that is most impressive and relevant to our current economic climate.
To top the trip off we were lucky enough to be allowed a quick tour of the plant room to see what and how the building was running... Boy was it crazyyy! ... At this point the maintenance man from Kier had lost me with all the technical gizmos about but I got the general gist of what he was saying ... transformers and the like ;) ... To be honest it's quite scary stuff especially the loud hum of the system that basically screams out danger to you! ... All in all very useful for the Tech & Services module as well as applying it to our design projects.
For more information on this building visit: http://www.breeam.org/page.jsp?id=584
