Project planning and co-ordination were key to the success of this project. The end goal was to accommodate the students’ return and to be able to occupy the teaching laboratory on the 2nd floor, connected via a bridge link to the new CLS Building.
To achieve this, enabling works took place as follows: A laboratory was moved from the 5th floor to the 8th floor, replacing the old IT room. This laboratory houses a mass spectrometer which is extremely sensitive to temperature change and thus required the installation of three new air conditioning and ventilation units, alongside the full refurbishment of floors, walls and electrics and the addition of laboratory-grade benching.
The 5th floor was converted to house the autoclave machines and fly food mixers that were previously on the second floor; again, as a full refurbishment, incorporating the creation of two new rooms and altering all electrical and mechanical ventilation.
A new electrical cable, to support the capacity of four autoclaves from a new distribution board, was pulled into the main distribution board.
Once the 5th floor refurbishment was completed, it allowed us to strip out the 2nd floor and work on the main project, namely three new offices, a data room and a student arrival area which incorporated banks of lockers, a break-out area and a wet-wash area, leading to the main teaching laboratory.
Apart from the obvious time restraints, we were attempting to achieve a seamless entrance from the recently built CLS building, into a building built in the 1960s.
