Collaboration
This award recognises and celebrates examples of collaborative working that have delivered outstanding outcomes on single or multiple new build, refurbishment, design or maintenance projects. It rewards the use of integrated processes that deliver outstanding measured building performance in terms of user satisfaction and comfort, energy and carbon, health and wellbeing and whole life value.
Winner: Streatham and Clapham High School – OR Consulting Engineers
Extending a busy London high school while keeping it fully operational was a challenge our Collaboration of the Year Award winner OR Consulting Engineers met with great success thanks to extensive communication and close collaborative working with stakeholders.
The OR team employed a range of tools to facilitate collaboration. At every step, the team undertook workshops for the client, teachers, pupils and neighbours to ensure all parties were involved and understood what was being proposed.
The Streatham and Clapham High School, located in a sensitive residential neighbourhood, forms part of a woodland corridor next to Streatham Common.
The client, Girls’ Day School Trust, wanted to extend while preserving its existing building to cater for new flexible teaching, a sixth form and dining spaces, but increasing the footprint of site excavation or introducing boreholes was not permitted.
The brief also included: adopting a ‘lean, mean and green’ environmental design strategy; avoiding light pollution or increased noise to neighbours; developing a sustainable travel plan; optimising the building’s energy performance; using sustainable/recycled materials; and acting as an exemplar project.
Physical models were developed to communicate design concepts and a document sharing portal was used. Revit and SketchUp were used to communicate ideas, while simple mock-ups were built to test plans.
The project was phased into two stages, and at the end of each the project team enabled ongoing collaboration into the operation of the building by:
• Providing separate soft landings for building operators and users
• Engaging in lesson learnt sessions and fed these lessons back into the phase 2 works
• Engaging with teachers, pupils and estates staff
• Providing on-going support to the school while the phase 2 works were delivered
• Carrying out post-occupancy evaluation (POE) and seasonal commissioning to finetune the phase 1 systems and feed into the commissioning of the phase-2 installations.
In its submission, OR Consulting said: ‘The new facilities have been a catalyst for the transformation of the whole school. The project has been complete for over two years and looks as it did upon completion and performs even better. This was made possible by all parties contributing to the conception, delivery and operation of the project.’
Judges said the project showed a clear structured and collaborative approach – with an exemplar use of POE. Overall, the category showed good examples of how projects can show true collaboration at any scale, with real evidence of building lessons learned into future designs.
Project Team
Building Owner: The Girl's Day School Trust
Building Occupier: Streatham and Clapham High School
Project Manager: Tuffin Ferraby Taylor LLP
Quantity Surveyor: Woodley Coles LLP
Architect: Cottrell & Vermuelen Architects
Mechanical/Electrical Engineering Contractor: Morgan Clark Building Services and Moyne London
Main Contractor: Rooff Limited
Developer: Engineers HRW
BREEAM - Method LLP
Acoustics - OR Consulting Engineers
Shortlist
Landsec Headquarters - WELL Certification - AECOM