Buildability has become something of a buzzword in construction. In our view, it is about the achievement of practical, economical and robust building construction that is safe to construct.
At Morrish buildability is the number one priority in our designs.
To achieve a high level of buildability we call upon our knowledge of architectural and building services issues, such as cold bridging, waterproofing, insulation etc. This knowledge allows us to develop details with our design partners that satisfy our need of structural performance and stability, together with their design requirements.
We recognise that we cannot work in isolation and impose our solutions on a project. We are always as flexible as we can be to accommodate the needs of our design partners. Again here our use of sophisticated computer analysis and design techniques allows us to push the boundaries of structural design allowing us to better provide compliant solutions.
Example Project: The project involved constructing a new swimming pool, changing room and gym annex on the footprint of an existing residential flat. The client’s brief included a green roof with a deep soil build up to give a wide flexibility of plant selection. There was a planning limit on the overall building height and the ground floor was difficult to lower. The client had had a previous proposal providing a 300mm deep structural steel and precast concrete roof slab. This produced a headroom of only 2100mm which was too imposing, and unacceptable to both the client and architect.
M&P, by using a concrete slab supported on steel box columns set into stud partitions, managed to reduce the structural depth to only 125mm. The slab was designed as a flat plate using finite element design software. Following the success of this design solution, Morrish were appointed to undertake the full design of the project.
The ability to produce buildable designs relies on the experience and expertise of our team members. Good designers possess a sixth sense that highlights the problem areas within a project and this sense comes from experience. We generally find that projects usually follow the 80:20 rule; we spend 80% of our time working on the difficult part, and 20% on the remainder. Take, for example, a building with overhanging roofs on all elevations. Many designers will develop the edge details and then consider the corner junction. However, it is the corner that always causes the problems, so we choose to start there and work back. Why do we do this? Quite simply we have learnt from experience that this is the more efficient way.