RIBA Award for Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
Following a 20-year refurbishment of
the Tay Bridge, the UK’s longest railway
structure, the work has been recognised as
an outstanding achievement and awarded
the top prize at the National Railway
Heritage Awards.
6 NSC
January 19
The prize went to Network Rail and
main contractor Taziker Industrial, which
carried out the extensive programme of
strengthening, repair and repainting works
on the Category A-listed bridge.
Local repairs and repainting of its
A mixed-use development that combines
retail, leisure and entertainment spaces,
commercial offices and residential
accommodation across four new buildings
and a number of existing buildings is
taking shape at London’s St Giles Circus.
The largest of the new buildings are
both steel-framed structures of seven and
five storeys, with the tallest incorporating
an innovative, retractable façade on its
middle floors, revealing an urban public
gallery that will open at street level.
The building’s foundations straddle the
Crossrail tunnel, above which the team,
which includes main contractor Skanska
and steelwork contractor Severfield,
is constructing an underground steelframed
box within a box to contain an
approach spans started in 1996 while
strengthening repairs took place between
2000 and 2004. Grit blasting and repainting
began in 2006 - with a total of 245,000m2 of
wrought iron and steel repainted.
Spanning a distance of 4.4km, the Tay
Bridge carries the railway across the Firth
of Tay. It was built between 1883 and 1887
and consists of 80 spans constructed of
wrought iron and 44 masonry arches on the
approaches to the north and south.
Large quantities of materials were used
in the construction of the bridge, with
approximately 16,000t of wrought iron used
for the piers and girders. A further 3,500t of
steelwork was also used along with 2,500t
of cast iron. The structure also contains
more than three million rivets.
Matthew Spence, Route Delivery
Director for Scotland at Network Rail, said:
“It is great to see the project recognised in
this way and this award caps two decades of
hard work in what can be extremely testing
conditions.
“Delivering a job of this scale in such
an exposed location has been an ongoing
challenge for our engineers and our
contractors, but with the refurbishment
now complete, the bridge will require
minimal maintenance for the next 25
years.”
News
The RIBA West Midlands’ Building
of the Year Award 2018 has been
presented to the Royal Birmingham
Conservatoire, the first purpose-built
music college built in the UK since
1987.
According to the judging panel, the
steel-framed Conservatoire represented
not only a rare opportunity to create a
state-of-the-art facility fit for the digital
era, but also to anchor Birmingham
City University’s expanding City Centre
Campus with a building of civic stature.
The building’s signature performance
spaces: a 500-seat orchestral concert hall,
a smaller recital hall, organ studio, ‘black
box’ experimental room and the Eastside
Jazz Club, posed the biggest challenges to
the construction team.
Each of them required a different
acoustic treatment to suit their size and
intended programme of music which, in
turn, influenced all aspects of the design,
necessitating an exceptional level of
architectural, environmental and acoustic
integration.
A box within a box design, whereby
all the spaces are individually isolated
from each other, was employed for the
music spaces. Each steel-framed space is
separated from its neighbour by insulation
and a void of at least 20mm.
Working on behalf of main contractor
Galliford Try, Mifflin Construction
fabricated, supplied and erected the
project’s steelwork.
Tay Bridge refurbishment wins national award
auditorium.
In a second phase of works, the team
will refurbish the adjacent buildings along
the north side of Denmark Street, which is
also known as Tin Pan Alley, an area with
a rich musical history.
The street was once home to the NME
and Melody Maker magazines, as well
as recording studios that saw The Kinks,
the Rolling Stones and Elton John pass
through their doors.
The refurbishment covers a number
of Grade II listed buildings on Denmark
Street, Denmark Place and St Giles High
Street, some dating back to before the
Great Fire of London in 1666.
Construction work started in July 2017
and is expected to be completed in 2020.
Tin Pan Alley redevelopment
taking shape
/Bridges
/Surface_preparation#Abrasive_blast_cleaning
/Design_for_steel_bridge_construction
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/Acoustics
/Design
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/Construction#Steel_erection
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