award winning architects

Tuesday, 14 February 2012 00:00

Simon Trew, Divisional Director

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Morriston Comprehensive School

We’re all breathing a sigh of relief having just submitted our planning application for Morriston Comprehensive School, an £18m new build and refurbishment project for City and County of Swansea.

It’s been a hectic few months following our appointment by Carillion in late October. We had to abandon the concept design by the original architect to allow the scheme to be built in phases around the existing school. This wasn’t such a bad thing as it was very inefficient and the significant area savings we made should help pay for some of the enhanced design features.

In Wales, the procurement process for secondary education schemes appears less painful and time consuming than the Academies programme in England, but still no less challenging. Following a number of successful school projects in recent years, we’ve built up strong relationships with a number of regional framework contractors who have been queuing up lately to grab us as their designers. For us, it’s usually a short tender process of a month or so, where we contribute our fee and experience for the contractor’s submission along with some high level concept sketches or if a Stage C design has been already undertaken a review of where the design can be improved – and that’s about it. If we’re successful, we’re straight into the design work after that and we hit the ground running. Importantly for consultants it avoids the high potentially abortive costs of the Academies programme.

As ever, Revit was hugely important for us in developing the design at speed and we are now about to embark on our first truly collaborative BIM model, integrating architectural, structural and MEP models using Navisworks.

I was also finally able to justify the expense of buying an iPad last year. It’s truly fantastic to link it up to a projector, beam a floor plan onto a wall at a design team meeting and then draw all over it via the tablet screen to work through design issues. Autodesk’s Design Review app is also really good fun with a projector for walking through 3D dwfs in real time. It’s surprisingly effective and a great way explaining a design to clients.

Next up for us is the huge task of getting the tender information out in the next four weeks.

If only there was an app for that...

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