P+HS have been listed in Building Magazine as one of the top employers in the construction industry, for the second year running. Besides being listed within the top 75 companies to appear in the guide, P+HS have made it into the top 5 Architects category and also the top 5 for smarter working and leadership.
P+HS Architects have announced the completion of one of the most significant and sustainable office developments in York, Heworth Green.
Situated on Heworth Green and fronting onto the new Heworth Green/James St Link Road, the £12 million development offers a total of 60,000 sq ft of Grade A office accommodation with open plan floor plates of 9540 sq ft, some of the largest in the city.
Benefiting from being only a seven minute walk from the main pedestrianised retail and restaurant core of York city centre, and with underground parking, it is no surprise that 20,000 sq ft has already been pre-sold to Hunters Estate Agents. Holiday Break Plc, trading as Superbreak Holidays, has taken a pre-let, leaving just the ground and first floors available.
The design by P+HS Architects exceeds the standards set within the latest part ‘L’ building regulations in terms of sustainability and thermal efficiency, and has a BREEAM rating of ‘very good’. Many sustainable features were incorporated into the design including a combined heating and cooling system with an integrated heat recovery system to reduce running costs. In addition, the off site construction method utilised by Tolent Construction for the external walling aims to reduce the CO2 emissions and speed up the erection process. This also allowed for a highly insulated shell, further reducing energy consumption.
The completed building benefits from a striking frontage as the design incorporates materials in different planes to emphasise the individual components, provide shadow, modulation and interest. Key elements and entrances are particularly emphasised using projecting bays or full height glazed slots. The external cladding system also reduces lifetime maintenance and operating costs with lower energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.
Heathrow Airport’s controversial Terminal 5 is set to be opened by the Queen in a ceremony involving hundreds of airport and construction workers. The £4.3bn terminal offers extra passenger capacity although the number of flights will not increase after it opens for business on 27 March.
Operator BAA says it will “transform” the level of service at the airport.
Environmental and residents groups who have opposed it say it will lead to more flights, noise and pollution.
The Queen, who in 1955 opened the airport’s first terminal building, what is now Terminal 2, will be accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh along with 800 invited guests, including hundreds of airport and construction workers involved in the project.
Some 60,000 people have worked a total of 100 million man hours to build Terminal 5 since construction began in September 2002!
Built on the site of a former sludge works at the western end of the existing airport, Terminal 5 has been designed by 2006 Stirling Prize winners Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners.
Its construction has involved diverting two rivers, building what is claimed to be the UK’s largest free-standing building and tunnelling 13km for rail and baggage links.
The complex includes 50 new aircraft stands, which will rise to 60 by 2010, two satellite buildings, one of which is still to be completed, rail links to London Underground and the Heathrow Express, and a new multi-storey car park. Friday’s official opening is of the project’s Phase 1, including Terminals 5A and 5B. Phase 2, which adds Terminal 5C, is set to open in 2010.
Once again, P+HS are featured in Yorkshire’s Top 50 Architects league table, ranked in 9th place - an increase of 3 places since last year.
The annual league table, published by the Yorkshire Post, features the top 50 Architects, ranked by the number of registered architects.
Following a high standard and large volume of entrants into the RICS Renaissance Awards 2008, it has been announced that Walkergate Park Hospital has been short listed in the Community Benefit and the Sustainability category.
The category winners and overall Project of the Year winner will be announced on 18 April 2008.
The UK’s first Internet “fibre town” could go online in the autumn, delivering Internet speeds of about 100Mbps (megabits per second) to consumers’ homes via new fibre optic networks.
Fibre firm ‘H2O’ provides super-fast broadband via the sewers; saving costly and disruptive road digging, and either Bournemouth, Northampton or Dundee will be offered the service first. These three have been selected because ‘H20′ has already installed its fibre service to local council buildings.
Last month BT announced that its own ‘fibre-to-the-home’ trial at Ebbsfleet in Kent would see the first homes connected by August of this year but this will initially be limited to around 600 new houses. The development will eventually have some 10,000 homes connected via fibre with speeds of up to 100Mbps but the project will take until 2020 to complete.
The current telecommunications system was never designed to carry large amounts of data and many have called for an urgent fibre upgrade. The mega-fast service will have instant appeal for consumers, and local businesses (i.e. for regular server updates between offices, etc).
English Partnerships’ standards were revised in November, reintroducing minimum space standards for new homes on their sites. These standards go beyond the old Parker Morris standards of the 1960’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Morris_Committee). New housing projects for English Partnerships’ sites will require dwellings to be a minimum of 51m2 for a 1 bed, rising to a minimum of 106m2 for a 4 bed (6 person) home.
England and Wales are the only countries in Europe with no minimum space standards for new housing.
The vast majority of private and public sector schemes we undertake will not require these standards but there is some useful design guidance on layout, storage etc on this imaginatively-titled website: www.swingacat.info
The government’s Carbon Challenge competition has produced its first winner - Barratt Developments, working with HTA architects and Arup among others, will build Britain’s first ‘eco-village’ on the site of the former Hanham Hall Hospital near Bristol.
Though on a more-modest, and many would argue more sensible scale, than the eco-towns, the Carbon Challenge schemes will have to go beyond zero carbon homes to inject a broader vision of ‘eco-lifestyle’. Hanhall Hall is to get rainwater capture, sustainable drainage, farmers’ shops, a car club and bicycle storage, while the main grade-ll listed building will be converted for community use. Onsite biomass CHP, supplying all homes in the scheme, will help achieve the requisite Level 6 in the Code for Sustainable Homes.
From RIBA Practice bulletin 427)
If you’ve still not quite caught up with British Winter Time and feel it’s not worth the hassle when your days feel ‘off-centre’, then here’s more evidence to back our protest!
‘Turning the clocks back each winter is being blamed for boosting greenhouse gas emissions and adding millions of pounds to power bills, according to a new study!
Elizabeth Garnsey, one of the authors, and a Reader in engineering and business at Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing said, ‘Under GMT, around 35% of the population are asleep when the sun rises in winter and so make no use of the extra daylight and when we come home from school or work in cold and darkness, we cause a surge in demand’.
Darker evenings under GMT cause households to use 2% more electricity, generating millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide, say researchers. ’Britain can only meet these daily surges by switching on less efficient back-up generating plants such as oil-fired powerstations.
The report calculates that, cumulatively, since the re-imposition of GMT (after a three year trial) in 1971, being on GMT+1 in winter could have supplied the population of Greater London with electricity for two years at current consumption rates!
For anyone who’s interested, the paper can be downloaded here
[Brendan Cronin and Elizabeth Garnsey, (19 October 2007), Daylight Saving in GB; Is there evidence in favour of clock time on GMT?]
Planning permission was successfully achieved yesterday for the new 1,716m2 Regional Agricultural Centre on the site of the long established and recognised Great Yorkshire Showground in Harrogate.
Plans submitted on behalf of the Yorkshire Agricultural Society were previously rejected by Harrogate Borough Council and subsequently revised by P+HS to address concerns over traffic flow and sustainability. New proposals include an innovative design strategy which incorporates sustainable principles, creating a showcase building with minimised impact on the environment. The new building, on the south side of the 250 acre showground comprises a total of 865m2 of office space, a farm shop of 710m2 (of which 267m2 is retail space) plus an 80 seater café (141m2). There will also be 43 car parking spaces.
‘Flood prevention is better than flood resilience’ according to the philosophy of the innovative Dutch floating house. A new daring development of 46 houses built on a Government-designated flood-overflow plane offers a new solution for the UK. Each two storey home is built upon a 70 ton watertight-hollow concrete box (acting as the ‘hull’), that floats secured laterally by two 5.5m horizontal mooring posts that connect to the neighboring house and six iron posts sunk into the bottom. When the river swells the house will float up to as much as 5.5m. Flexible pipes house the building services and utilities, and when the floodwaters subside, so the houses return to their original position! Developed by Dura Vermeer builders and designed by Factor Architecten (design firm based in Amsterdam), the floating houses look as if they will catch on! But at a starting price of 260,000 euros (£180,000 or $310,000), the houses are not a cheap option.
Dura Vermeer is designing a ‘floating city’ for 12,000 people near Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, which could include floating schools, hospitals and shops! Construction is planned in 2010.
This Photograph was taken on site on Tuesday the 3rd of July 2007.
The project is coming along well with the majority of glazing and louvres now in place.
The rainscreen cladding is due to be fixed week commencing 23.07.07.
In a short article on BD’s website, writer Phil Clarke pokes a few big names with the pointy stick of online culture. P+HS appear in amongst the likes of HOK and Foreign Office Architects, but not to be lambasted, rather held up as an example of innovative web-use.
This link will take you to the site, which contains a link back to our blog, I can’t confirm whether clicking that link will result in you being engulfed in a swirling vortex of internet feedback.
