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AWARD – Aviva Studios, Manchester

A world-class cultural venue, which captures the creative vision of the Manchester International Festival, has large flexible spaces capable of operating as a theatre or concert hall to host various performance types and exhibitions.

FACT FILE
Architect: Office for Metropolitan Architecture
Structural engineer: Buro Happold
Steelwork contractor: William Hare Limited
Main contractor: Laing O’Rourke
Client: Manchester City Council

Steel construction has come to the fore with the erection of interlinked trusses, mega-columns and numerous long-span plate girders, all of which form a new cultural building on a constrained inner city site in Manchester.

Aviva Studios is a multi-purpose creative venue built by the council. It will be run by the team behind Manchester International Festival (MIF), the city’s biennial arts celebration. It is supported by Manchester City Council, HM Government and Arts Council England.

The building occupies around 17,000m² and includes a large warehouse space and adjoining theatre that can be used independently or together. Set within the St. John’s regeneration area, on the site of the former Granada TV Studios, the building enhances the city’s status as a hub for arts and culture.

“Flexibility is key to the project’s design,” explains Laing O’Rourke Project Technical Leader Andy Bell. “The performance spaces have moveable partitions and are acoustically-isolated so they can be used individually or as one large area.”

Overall, the steel-framed structure can be divided into four main parts, the aforementioned venues, an office and back-of-house zone, and a truck lift. The latter is structurally-independent from the rest of the building and is enclosed in an in-situ concrete box cantilevering over Water Street. The two lifts within are formed from steel frames and have an impressive 40t capacity each, which will allow the movement of the largest of exhibits in and out of the building from ground floor level to the performance floor on level 2.

The biggest of the two venues is the warehouse and it measures 68m-long, 34m-wide and 20m-high. It can be one large performance space, or divided in two by closing a set of large steel-framed acoustic partitions, that will retract around the interior walls on tracks.

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Meanwhile, the interconnected theatre can also be used simultaneously as another individual venue, but the addition of two 60t acoustic proscenium doors, that can be raised, will allow it to connect into the warehouse, significantly enlarging the stage. The doors are supported by a 23m-long × 5m-deep truss, which weighs 125t.

A box-in-box approach has been used on the scheme. This structural design means there are two isolated inner boxes (theatre and warehouse), both surrounded by a void (up to 2.5m-thick) and then a larger outer box. The latter box is formed by series of 300mm-thick concrete panels, which are isolated from the main steel frame via acoustic bearings.

The inner steel-framed warehouse box has an attached series of 200mm-thick precast isolation panels, while the theatre has 200mm-thick timber panels supported by its steelwork.

This complex acoustic treatment not only negates noise ingress between performance spaces but also prevents sound penetrating the venues from potentially noisy neighbours.

As well as creating the box-in-box design, structural steelwork has formed trusses and transfer structures that help the building bridge over a number of site constraints.

One of the more challenging parts of the steel frame is known as the west mega wall, that spans over Water Street, separates the warehouse from the theatre and contains the connecting proscenium arch.

On the opposite side of the warehouse, the east mega wall is slightly less complex and has more locations where the vertical structure can continue down to foundation level, and so it has four mega columns, one more than the west wall.

Each of the so-called mega columns are approximately 2.5m × 2.5m on plan, 34m in height and are made up of heavy UC columns in each corner with UC bracing between.

Limited space for the mega columns has been compounded by the fact that the middle member of the west wall’s three columns had to be located directly above numerous important arterial service routes.

To solve this conundrum, a large truss supports this central mega column, diverting 5,000t of load via a cantilever into the ground and away from the subterranean services.

An interlinked series of trusses spanning between the mega columns, form the warehouse and theatre roofs. What is known as a ‘collector truss’, consisting of two parallel roof trusses braced together along top and bottom chords spans between the mega columns within the west wall.

The collector truss over Water Street is 12m-deep and supports the main warehouse floor via a series of hangers. Meanwhile, over the proscenium arch the collector truss decreases to 10m-deep. The collector trusses also support more trusses, up 36m-long and 5m-deep that form the warehouse roof. Within their depth, theses trusses support walkways and associated services, which are needed by the multi-purpose venue.

The roof trusses also absorb considerable loadings as they also support a crane and its two runway beams, which will allow the warehouse to display and move large exhibits hung from the roof.

“Trussed steelwork is material efficient, saving both cost and embodied carbon over alternative solutions. It is highly suited to prefabrication, is dimensionally controlled and can form the complex shapes and junctions needed on this intricate building,” says Buro Happold Structures Associate Ben Lewis.

The theatre roof truss also spans onto the west wall’s collector trusses, connected via acoustically isolated bearings to mitigate noise transfer between the theatre and warehouse.

A similar truss arrangement has been used along the east mega wall, although it is made up of a single planer truss, which spans between the four mega columns to support the floors.

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