The brief
Client - Bowmer & Kirkland
Vaux Building 2, is a 6 storey office building situated on the old Vaux Brewery site in Sunderland.
This impressive structure spans two plots (Plot 13 & 14) and forms part of the Vaux Masterplan, a project designed to reinvent the south bank of the River Wear.
Each plot has a central concrete stability cores surrounded by a composite 300mm precast concrete slab with supporting steel beams. The two plots are liked by a full height atrium which has an impressive circular rooflight.
The approach
As an Engineered project, our primary design responsibility was steel-to-steel and steel-to-concrete connections. This structure's stability core was assembled from pre-cast concrete sections, meaning that the core walls were both unusually thin, and packed more tightly with reinforcement than a traditional slip-core core. Connecting the precast cores to the long spanning pre-cast floor units supplied a unique challenge, because as well as avoiding reinforcement, we could not install fixings close to the many panel joints either.
The outcome
The finished building handed over to Sunderland Council was both impressive and striking. The hard work in designing compact connections under extremely onerous dimensional constraint paid off in the crisp finishes achieved in both the steel and the precast.
The project was delivered on time, on budget, and stands a testament to the teamwork applied across many trades, from the precast suppliers and the consulting engineers to the cellbeam manufacturer.
Gallery
Working with Hambleton Steel on Manchester City Campus College was an enjoyable experience for ourselves and the wider design team. Hambleton brought their knowledge and skill by collaboratively working with the whole team from RIBA Stages 2/3 until completion by problem solving, giving advise on buildability and bringing efficiencies to the design to ensure it maintained within budget.
They’ve done a cracking job on here for us and I personally would have no hesitation in using them again.
Pleasure working with you and your team, and great turnround on the scheme and a good finished product with no major issues on site along with a final account agreed, cant do much better than that. Happy to put you forward where we can and would definitely work with yourselves again.
From a design point of view, very happy with the design process. Jack and team were proactive throughout and the securing of the steel at that time was also extremely proactive of HSL.
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