Queen Mary University of London

Dramatic presence and an eye-catching facade

The Project

Part of the School of Humanities, the 5-storey building contains a large auditorium, studios, teaching and administration facilities designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects Limited for Queen Mary’s University of London at its Mile End Campus. The new film and drama studio is clad in distinctive glass panels – digitally printed with artwork by the artist Jacqueline Poncelet.  QMUL is highly ranked amongst UK universities for the provision of arts and humanities courses.


Building Control

Oculus provided the building control services for the multi-million pound Humanities Building and assisted the Design Team with the challenging issue of ensuring the building was not affected by noise and vibration from the nearby underground system.  At foundation level the structure is effectively bearing on anti-vibration pads to limit noise and vibration migrating into the building’s structure.

Since 2002, Oculus has provided the building control services for many of the phases of the Mile End Campus student village, where award winning buildings have created 1,200 student rooms, restaurants, retail and other facilities. The Humanities Building is an important element of its on-going development and has pride of place prominently positioned on the Mile End Road – a main arterial route into central London.


CASE STUDY
Pegasus House

Standing immediately beside Barnwell House, iconic Aerospace Building Pegasus House has also officially opened following restoration and renovation works. Originally the headquarters of the Bristol Aerospace Company, Pegasus House is a Grade II listed art-deco building built in 1936 which is now at the heart of the new Airbus Aerospace Park. Several heritage features have been retained including a historic four storey stained glass window that chronologically illustrates the evolution of the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s planes, referencing Greek mythology & folklore.

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CASE STUDY
Middleport Pottery

Middleport Pottery, the UK’s last working Victorian pottery was originally constructed in 1888 for Burgess & Leigh, a local ceramics company, where beautiful Burleigh pottery was produced using extremely rare skills.

In 2011, United Kingdom Historic Building Preservation Trust (UKHBPT) embarked on a long journey to save the site from closure and to protect the complex that houses historic machinery, archives and collections of the past. The traditional industrial factory and its original function have been conserved, repaired and regenerated for community benefit. The areas of museum demonstrate the skilful process being undertaken in a traditional manner. 

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CASE STUDY
Airbus - AWIC

The new £40m Aircraft Wing Integration Centre is arranged to maximise opportunities for departments to share spaces, equipment and ideas and will provide an innovative, highly flexible and easily adaptable physical test environment that forms a proving ground for the future technologies. This includes Airbus’ Wings of tomorrow programme, part of which focuses on exploring how wings can be more efficient, lighter and easier to make and assemble, looking at the best materials to use, assembly techniques and new technologies in aerodynamics and wing architecture. Covering 9,050m2 the scheme comprises hangar facilities including a 'Strong Floor' and relocatable ‘Strong Wall’, a high capacity hydraulic system to power multiple test rigs, three overhead cranes, laboratories, testing control rooms and open plan offices. As this facility is to be used to develop new technologies it was clearly important to build in flexibility for future uses. The delivery team was involved through this period and translated the design development into physical form with the same mind-set.

The ‘Strong Floor’ itself is 40 metres long by 18 metres wide and is housed within a building over 25 metres tall to allow the testing of full size wings from the largest Airbus aircraft including long term fatigue testing. A total of 1,440 cubic metres of concrete was used for the floor which took some 23 hours to cast to a total depth of two metres. The steel reinforcement amounted to a total of approximately 280 tonnes of rebar, estimated to be around 54 km laid end-to-end.

The 'Strong Wall' is 14 metres long, 10 metres high, 4.5 metres deep and has a total weight of 220 tonnes. It is made up of four modules and can be configured in two separate two module walls or a single four module wall. The mounting surfaces are machined to a close tolerance and when erected on the strong floor all points on the flange faces are within +/-1mm of a flat vertical plane. The structure is designed to cope with billions of load cycles so resistance to fatigue is the determining factor as well as its immense strength.

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