Architecture: Sports Centre Design

[Acidburns]

I have just completed the external examination for my 2nd semester design project. I thought that this would be a bit different from the usual AMP stuff. I'm too tired to go into any great length. Maybe later if people are interested.

The University is considering the construction of a new Sports Centre across from the existing library building. This gave us the opportunity to work with the University Estates Management and existing Sports Centre staff in a sort of "live" project. I am a fourth year Building Design Engineering Student, from the architecture stream of the course. In this project I worked with two environmental engineering students and one structural engineering student (also from the BDE course, but different streams).

What follows is a tiny selection of the work I outputted. The project was presented as a 4 minute multimedia presentation introduction, followed by a 40 minute presentation and question session with the external examiners. The final presentation was 6.5M by around 1.5M, it pretty much filled up a whole wall. I should get a picture of myself and the engineers in front of the presentation tomorrow.

I'll add something about the building concept after, I'm pretty exhausted, but satisfied, the presentation went great. This project is worth 20% of our entire degree, we'll get our marks tomorrow.

[Starglider]

Looks good. I confess that I have an inexplicable fascination with leisure centre architecture. I'm curious why the roof support girders are exposed rather than under the roof.

[Acidburns]

Looks good. I confess that I have an inexplicable fascination with leisure centre architecture. I'm curious why the roof support girders are exposed rather than under the roof.

The centre has a pool and indoor hall and these required a large clear span of around 32 meters. In order to span this distance some fairly extensive structure was required. There are several taller university buildings that look down onto it from across the road, and the visual appearance of the roof is something that is often neglected. By placing the supporting structure on the outside we created a nice clean internal space without the need for suspended ceilings, while giving the building a unique architectural character.

The exposed structure does create cold-bridging problems that could cause significant heat loss, but careful detailing of the connection and insulation can avoid this.

[Turin]

The centre has a pool and indoor hall and these required a large clear span of around 32 meters. In order to span this distance some fairly extensive structure was required. There are several taller university buildings that look down onto it from across the road, and the visual appearance of the roof is something that is often neglected. By placing the supporting structure on the outside we created a nice clean internal space without the need for suspended ceilings, while giving the building a unique architectural character.

The exposed structure does create cold-bridging problems that could cause significant heat loss, but careful detailing of the connection and insulation can avoid this.

Your mechanical engineers will want to strangle you for not letting them place their precious rooftop equipment willy-nilly all over the roof.

Nice-looking though. What's going on there at the entrance? The tall planar shapes look like they frame the doors from a distance, but then (if I'm seeing the images correctly) you actually going around them to the doors. Which is okay, and presumably inspired by something in your building approach, but then it looks like you've got a pretty ordinary door stuck in what is otherwise some kind of nifty storefront glass system. Can you explain this is in a little detail, I don't think the renderings are quite doing it justice?

What's the construction of the bays of the front facade? Between the steel it looks like you've got some kind of louvering system, but it really seems to light up a lot in your nighttime renderings (your renderings are all pretty sharp, by the way).

No plans? I'd like to see your partie. Looks from your section like you've got a split down the middle (maybe with offices and common spaces, but separating the major sports spaces left-right if my guess is right), circulation down the front, and mechanical/support out back?

Not to make this into another examination, but seeing as how your group has a good engineering contingent, when you make your more extended post, can you maybe explain a little bit about how the building addresses the site from the standpoint of sustainability? (I'm sitting for the LEED exam here in the US soon and so obviously this is a big interest of mine.)

[Acidburns]

I intended the entrance to have glass doors with a metal kickplate on the bottom, but I forgot to enable the materials on that western entrance. It wasn't too bad for the engineers ducting, I worked with them to fit the ducting into the flooring system. The building isn't directly up against any buildings, this allowed us to place the plant and air intakes at the rear, rather than on the roof.

I just had a good idea. I've uploaded the 3 minute multimedia clip we produced to youtube:

Youtube

This has a simple colour coded plan, and there is an animation that explains the construction of the exterior quite well. Some odd artefacts have appeared during part of the fly-through - youtube doesn't seem to like it when the camera moves very fast.

I've tried to crop the drawings to keep the filesizes down, these were created in mind for a 200DPI print on A1 paper, so they have very thin lines on huge images, and thus dont downsize well, but they should be readable if a bit big.

This drawing shows the external column/truss connection and how the glass is supported off the back of the external bowstrings that hold up the louvres:



With regards to sustainability some key choices were made:

Efficient zoning arrangement of spaces: By placing the circulation as a buffer between the very warm pool space and the much cooler halls/class spaces we can cut down on transmission losses.

Material Choice: Scottish Grown Douglas Fir timber cladding grown from a sustainable source. Both the steel and timber can be re-used or recycled at the end of the buildings lifespan.

CHP plant: With a high all year round heating load from the pool space this building is ideally suited for a CHP system. Excess electricity can be used in the neighbouring University Library (which is a horrible building with no natural light whatsoever, and is open 24 hours during exam times).

Heat Recovery: Heat exchangers allow recovery of waste heat from ventilation.

Site Level: The site slopes upward from front to rear currently. By having the 2m deep pool accessible from one above ground level, the foundation s can be built on top of a 1.5m layer of soil, allowing us to reduce the amount of soil that needs to be carried off-site. See section below:



Translucent Insulation: For the pool and hall roof-lights nanogel(or aerogel or something) panels were used instead of glass. This material has a low U-value while still allowing light transmission. It also diffuses the light, which is useful for hall spaces where you do not want direct sunlight.

[Turin]

Before I continue with my comments, I should give you some of my background. I'm an architectural designer in the US with 8 years experience with fairly large commercial projects -- mainly telecommunications data centers/switching stations and pharmaceutical research & manufacturing. I'm currently pursuing professional registration, so I'm not a capital-A Architect yet, but I'm considered a "project architect" at my firm which means at this point I've midwived a handful of large buildings from initial design through construction. All my comments are intended to be "IMO" friendly advice.

I intended the entrance to have glass doors with a metal kickplate on the bottom, but I forgot to enable the materials on that western entrance.

That happens to me all the time! What program did you use to do the renderings and animation?

It wasn't too bad for the engineers ducting, I worked with them to fit the ducting into the flooring system. The building isn't directly up against any buildings, this allowed us to place the plant and air intakes at the rear, rather than on the roof.

Makes sense, although in my experience I've noticed this sometimes causes problems with the local municipality. I'm not sure how things are in Scotland, but here in Philadelphia (US), the city has limitations on the dB permitted at various heights -- the higher you go the louder you're allowed to be. With a low building like this and the heavy mechanical load of the pool, you'd spend a lot of budget on noise reduction. Still, sometimes you have to make a concept-level decision and just stick to it... the trick is then selling it to the client.

I just had a good idea. I've uploaded the 3 minute multimedia clip we produced to youtube:

Youtube

This has a simple colour coded plan, and there is an animation that explains the construction of the exterior quite well. Some odd artefacts have appeared during part of the fly-through - youtube doesn't seem to like it when the camera moves very fast.

Very nice. The construction animation was really well put together, and that last set of night-time animations was really lovely, although I'm not sure what the color-change was supposed to be. The bowstring truss pieces rotated horizontally to support the exterior wall puzzled me a little bit, but I guess I'll trust your structural guy on that (see my next comment).

This drawing shows the external column/truss connection and how the glass is supported off the back of the external bowstrings that hold up the louvres:

There's no annotation on this drawing, so forgive a couple questions. The bowstrings are anchored between the main support steel, and then the vertical channels that hold the louvres are welded to the bowed chord, right? Is there any kind of vertical tying the bowstrings together in the back, or is the entire load of the louvers + supporting steel rotating about the ends of the bowstrings? It can be done... but as one of the structural engineers I work with is fond of saying "anything can be done, it's just a question of whether you want to pay for it."

With regards to sustainability some key choices were made:

Efficient zoning arrangement of spaces: By placing the circulation as a buffer between the very warm pool space and the much cooler halls/class spaces we can cut down on transmission losses.

Is the front of the building south-facing? It's hard to tell from your images.

Material Choice: Scottish Grown Douglas Fir timber cladding grown from a sustainable source. Both the steel and timber can be re-used or recycled at the end of the buildings lifespan.

That sort of cladding has such a lovely finish to it, too. I'm glad to see it being used more and more on larger-scale projects (unfortunately the head of design at my firm is enamored with aluminum panels, which are hard to get from local sustainable sources). I like that you've thought about what happens when the building gets torn down, which inevitably happens to all buildings. CMU is cheap and quick and relatively sustainable, but all you get out of it is road-fill at the end-of-life.

CHP plant: With a high all year round heating load from the pool space this building is ideally suited for a CHP system. Excess electricity can be used in the neighbouring University Library (which is a horrible building with no natural light whatsoever, and is open 24 hours during exam times).

I had to look this one up, as we typically call CHP "co-gen" here in the states, or at least in my region. I'm actually just completing a natural gas co-generation plant for a community college in New Jersey -- lots of universities like these sorts of systems because they let the newer and more efficient buildings take some of the load off of their older equipment (as you've done here). There's an awesome cogen plant at UPenn that's right near the river. Unfortunately I can't seem to find an image of it, but its entire perimeter is a metal screen that's oval-shaped in plan. At night the building it lit up and you can see all the brightly-painted equipment... they decided to "celebrate" the cogen gear rather than hide it behind a concrete box, and it was a good choice.

Heat Recovery: Heat exchangers allow recovery of waste heat from ventilation.

I'm not sure how detailed you got on this, but desiccant wheels as part of your heat recovery system would be particularly effective with the pool here, as a lot of your exhaust is going to be very humid. We used giant desiccant wheels for a huge pharma lab building in upstate NY recently, which was particularly effective in that cold climate. They were something on the order of 3m tall!

Translucent Insulation: For the pool and hall roof-lights nanogel(or aerogel or something) panels were used instead of glass. This material has a low U-value while still allowing light transmission. It also diffuses the light, which is useful for hall spaces where you do not want direct sunlight.

Well you just taught me something. I wasn't aware this sort of product was commercially available for building material yet, but a quick Google search revealed there's a manufacturer of Aerogel in Massachusetts. You'd probably detail this with the aerogel blanket sandwiched between glass (it doesn't appear to be particularly rigid in any of the product info I'm seeing) in something resembling a more conventional skylight. The trick is making sure you've designed the whole assembly so the dewpoint is where you want it. Clever use of material there.