Background

As part of the huge new campus for Birmingham City University(BCU) a new conservatoire has been built to serve the city.

The project was made tricky by the aesthetic requirement of the building, particularly the plan to leave some of the corridor services exposed and on view to the public.

At seven storeys high this heavily serviced building was the largest Arts project we have undertaken. 

Approach

Using Revit 2014, the first task we was to re-coordinate all of the exposed corridor areas. We rerouted pipework to eliminate as many air-locks and dead-legs as we could and reduced their overall number to less than 5% than originally existed in the Stage 4a drawings we were presented with. This also stream-lined all of the services, making their installation, cost and maintainability better by many factors than had originally been planned by the design team.

We worked closely with Imtech to develop the design of services in the main performance halls and, working with detailed architectural Revit models, we were able to achieve route the large amount of services required (particularly electrical) to make these spaces work whilst maintaining the very high specification for the finishes in the areas.

The building was also highly modularised. Imtech used the prefabrication module manufacturer to produce the drawings. We needed close involvement with this company and provided space in our offices over the duration of the project where we could work side by side.

Results

The result is a spectacular looking building serving the local community. All aspects of the aesthetic were met, including in the areas where services were exposed. 

The services were installed much more safely using the prefabricated modules and we had a successful partnership working with a company producing separate prefabrication details.

The model was also successfully used for an equipment BIM take-off for the on-going facilities management for the building.