Southern Regional College, Banbridge

SRC, Banbridge Campus - The building features approximately 4500m2 of outstanding new learning facilities, including a dedicated Learning Resource Centre and an innovation hub. The new campus is set to become a specialist hub for digital media and design, promoting learning excellence and skills development with the latest technology and educational resources, offering a wide range of full time and part time courses through to degree level. The exemplar design utilised CFA piles and a grillage of ground beams, however Design ID value engineered the substructures to omit the internal ground beams, utilising a flat slab supported by individual pile caps. Despite being in an urban area, precast driven piles were used after demonstrating at preconstruction stage that noise and vibration limits could be met. This brought the added benefit of a significant reduction in lorry movements to and from the site, as neither ready mix concrete or removal of pile arisings was required during the piling operation, as would have been the case for CFA piles. The superstructure is a 3 storey braced steel frame, with long span composite beams supporting prestressed hollowcore slabs and utilising composite action to minimise beam size. Rather than using shallow slimflor beams to maximise the ceiling service zone, the services requirement was interrogated and coordinated in detail at RIBA Stage 3 to allow deeper (and lighter) beams to be used, with service penetrations through the web. This created a 10-15% reduction on steel tonnage from the exemplar design. Design ID completed the following Civil Engineering design services for the project; boundary treatment design, site earthworks strategy, proposed site levels, car parking and access road arrangement, foul water and surface water drainage, pavement build-up design and consultation with Statutory Parties. The SUDS strategy for storm water management utilised below ground geocellular attenuation structures, oversized concrete pipes and flow control structure to restrict outflow to green field run-off values. Following completion of the new building, the existing college building was demolished and new car parking provided to the rear of the site. The project was modelled to BIM Level 2 using Revit & Navisworks to allow overlay of all IST models & ensure effective design coordination & clash avoidance to achieve a high design quality.