Download our brochureThe Square, Colchester
- Client: Wrenbridge
- Architect: SMC Covell Matthews
- Market Sector: Commercial/Offices
- Services: Civil Engineering, Structural Engineering, Building Control, Sustainability
The project comprised the refurbishment of a 1970’s office building with a structure comprising a braced steel frame supporting concrete upper floors cast in situ on profile steel sheets and ground floors of part precast and part ground bearing construction. The structure is supported on a piled foundation.
Structurally, the challenge was to provide an increased lettable floor
area by infilling the atrium void and extending the perimeter floor
area, with some amendments to the stair cores, by taking support
and cantilevering off the existing structure whilst avoiding any works
to the existing foundations.
This was achieved by a combination of:
- Re analysing the existing structure using state of the art finite element software to extract the maximum capacity from the existing structure.
- Infilling and extending the floor areas using lightweight floor construction using cold rolled steel beams and ply decking.
- Making use of English Heritage / Ove Arup research on imposed loads for historic buildings to argue the case for imposed loads of 2.5+1.0kN/m2, lower than the original design load of 4.0+1.0kN m2 established during the design analysis.
By successfully implementing the above we were able to provide our Client with the increased floor areas with no strengthening of the superstructure or foundation works except for the additional external fire escape staircase necessary to comply with current regulations.
The MLM team were instrumental in achieving BREEAM for offices VERY GOOD status.