http://bit.ly/BWNewsUpdatesReusing buildings and achieving Net Zero.
Physiotherapy’s really close by.So it’s easy to get hold of people.’.
Of the building’s general layout, Kirsty Cobden comments that usefully, ‘Everything goes round in a circle.There are no dead ends, so you don’t have to go back on yourself.You just keep going all the way round.’.
Maswiken also remarks on this ease of movement within the hospital.He enjoys the freedom of not having to ‘push things aside’ to walk between areas.
The hallways are very spacious, particularly when compared to the ‘narrow corridors’ of other hospitals in which he has worked.
‘For safety reasons,’ he says, ‘I feel very reassured that it’s very safe in terms of evacuation and day-to-day movement.So we designed a trench system, covered with a grille, to surround all the critical areas, and we extract the air from the trench.
Any nitrogen is pulled into the trench by the extraction (we’re extracting the air from the whole space through the trench), but also by gravity because it’s heavier than air.It seems almost obvious, but because it was a groundbreaking MEP design , we did comprehensive testing and modelling to make sure it would work, using computational fluid dynamics (a digital way of predicting how air will move through a building).
GSK – quite rightly – have a very strong Health and Safety culture, so the testing threshold was incredibly high.But the system passed, we installed it and it’s working very well.. Also in Stevenage, we worked with GSK on the lab grade water system.