Software helps build unique school

3D structural engineering technology is enabling ambitious plans for a specialised state school in east London to be realised

Opening in September 2007, the Bridge Academy is a secondary school offering outstanding educational opportunities for pupils in Hackney, a multicultural borough in east London, UK. Sponsored by financial services firm UBS, the new school forms part of a wider regeneration of the area. The school specialises in music and mathematics, subjects that research has shown to complement each other and to promote learning and development in other subjects.

The primary challenge for the design team was to fit a school
for 1,150 pupils, including sports facilities, on a small site

The building will have a suite of music rooms on the ground floor and each level will have dedicated learning areas for different subjects. A 450-seat performance theatre, 180-seat lecture theatre and a sports hall will form part of the advanced facilities.

Cutting edge software was used to help design the building. This is also playing a crucial role in delivering its construction throughout the 2007/2008 academic year, during which educational facilities will be housed in a temporary building.

Out with the old
Building Design Partnership (BDP) was appointed as architect, structural engineer, and building services engineer for the Bridge Academy project. The primary challenge for the design team was to fit a school for 1,150 pupils, including sports facilities, on a site with a small footprint. This challenge was exacerbated by the boundary formed by the Grand Union Canal on one side, mitigating any opportunity for expansion. BDP’s design solution was to build upward, creating a vertical school more than seven stories high.

The project is rather like a piece of origami, with elements folding over each other on this small site. “The team designed a building without columns, dispensing with dark corridors and corners reminiscent of schoolhouses of old,” says Michelle McDowell, director of civil and structural engineering at BDP. “Teaching spaces are accessed from open balconies that look out over the canal and sit behind an ETFE [Ethylene TetrafluoroEthylene] wrap, allowing light to flood through the building – improving the sense of community and security.”

Three building elements form the basis of the design: the “sound shell”, a performance hall and a sports hall. The sound shell houses almost all of the main teaching spaces and acts as a cocoon around the social heart of the school. The north and south halves of the shell are arranged on half levels so that adjacent teaching spaces are reached by 10 steps in the staircase, providing stronger links across the different academic departments. A play deck and learning resource centre are suspended from the sound shell and are located above the central square, which opens out onto a café with views to the canal.

The 450-seat concert hall for use by the wider community outside of school hours was another opportunity for unique design. It is designed as a pavilion surrounded by nature, set among a hanging garden.

The sports hall has been sunk into the ground to reduce its height and with glazing at street level. Separate access is provided for off-hours use of the sports hall and a fitness room for local clubs. Terraces at each level of the building allow for a continuous stepped landscape from the top of the sports hall down to the canal.

Improving workflow with 3D
A 3D animation, created by 3DW, was particularly useful in the early briefing stages of the project as the model was viewed around the world in various offices of client and sponsor organisations. It was also used as a tool for the local population of the London Borough of Hackney to see the building in context and take a virtual tour of the building’s internal spaces.

3D visualisation helps to simplify the understanding
of a complex spatial arrangement

Building information modelling (BIM) was critical to realising this design efficiently and clearly. The entire building is organic in form and BIM made it easy to generate the building form, to adjust it to suit the internal space requirements, and to accurately define the geometry of the ETFE envelope cladding.

Using BIM enabled the ambitious nature of the structural system and its relation to the architecture to be developed with BIM and analysis working together. The key coordination issues relating to routing of services around the building could be tested in conjunction with the structure and architecture. Using a combination of BIM and 3D visualisation, the project team was able to see, and verify the outcome of the developed structural solution. BIM also allowed the project team to understand the steelwork connections more fully and develop simplifications where possible.

The multiprofession BDP design team used Bentley products to deliver the design information for the project. The combination of 3D visualisations, BIM and traditional 2D drawings cut from the model developed with Bentley Structural and Bentley Mechanical Systems enabled the team to inspire the client and investor and assist their understanding of the building form. These tools made the definition of the complex geometry fast, accurate, and efficient, and empowered the team to design a tight-fit building with architecture, structure, and building services fully coordinated before starting on-site.

3D visualisation of the building allowed BDP to identify parts of the building that required further refinement, to communicate with people who could not read 2D drawings and to create an excitement about the potential of the project among a wide group of people, It also helped to reassure the local planning authority of the setting of the building in its context to simplify the understanding of a complex spatial arrangement and to closely investigate the behaviour of daylight within the building.

“An unexpected result of employing Bentley’s BIM solutions was the change in traditional workflow,” says McDowell. “With the structural engineering team taking ownership of the setting out of the building form, an aspect normally driven by the architect, the multidisciplinary nature of BDP made this transfer of responsibility possible. Moreover, through collaborative work on the model, the building form was easily established and defined for use in the structural engineering, building services, and architectural packages. As the structural virtual model took the lead role in the design development, the architectural and services schemes were wrapped around and through the building model to ensure best fit.”

BDP was able to export the entire BIM data to Bentley’s popular structural engineering software product STAAD and carry out structural analysis. This reduced the time required to test design options on this complex building by about a third. Only one model was required; there was no need to duplicate work by producing one model for analysis and another for building definition. And the supply chain is made more efficient by handing the 3D structural model, instead of traditional fabrication drawings, to a steel fabricator.

Bentley software now permeates the entire building process, giving BDP the competitive edge in concept forming, analysis, and design and adding value for the client and supply chain. “Bentley Building products provide us with the best tool set in today’s market for architects, structural, and building services engineers to design and analyse complex buildings in the multiprofession environment,” says McDowell. “The software gives our designers the flexibility to make what-if changes as part of the design progression and the confidence that the solutions are workable.”

Design feasibility studies at various stages of a project usually take up numerous hours of valuable time. The studies were streamlined to a report-checking procedure and an interference check as the design progressed. Due to the complexity of the structure and the services that were needed to fit within the available space, certain design iterations that would have traditionally taken weeks to complete were achieved within days using the suite of building design tools and the links to analysis software.