SDA 2022 Entries

• Commercial Building - Buildings that are used for commercial purposes, and include retail, hospitality, workplaces, factories and warehouses and buildings where commercial services are provided. At least 50 percent of the buildings’ floor space will be used for commercial activities. 

Background

Three New Bailey is a highly flexible commercial office building in Salford’s New Bailey masterplan.

Designed solely for HMRC on behalf of The English Cities Fund, it is part of a strategic joint venture between national urban regenerator, Muse Developments, Legal & General and Homes England, in partnership with Salford Council.

As a gateway building immediately adjacent to Salford Central train station, Three New Bailey has a strong and commanding identity providing a sense of arrival to the masterplan as a whole.

Built to last, this simple, honest, and highly efficient structure offers a flexible and sustainable solution to HMRC’s workplace needs for today and the future.

The building cost (Gross Development Value) was approximately £42million (value confidential please). Planning was submitted in May 2018, consented in Sept 2018 and practical completion was achieved in March 2021

The overall design
Inspired by the region’s industrial heritage in the cotton and textiles trade, Three New Bailey is the UK’s first large scale building with interwoven clay brick elevations.

The seven storey 14,733m2 structure is rectilinear in design with highly articulated red brick façades, which help to break up the orthogonal mass, creating depth, movement, and interest, referencing the city’s traditional 19th-century warehouse architecture.
The external architectural language is continued inside, with the red brick façade wrapping from outside to inside drawing visitors into a double-height entrance space, where the transition of outer red brick to inner white brick increases the lightness of the internal spaces.

Large repeating floors measure 94mx30m and provide 25,000ft2 net area each, with only five on-floor columns and a side core to maximise working flexibility.

The Facades

The unique intricate brick façades are made up of two different weave types: a plain (basket) weave for the short elevations and a twill weave for the longer strips on the vertical elevations.

The independent treatment of the vertical and horizontal sections articulates a subtle variation across the building structure, whilst the curved corner panels and glazing help transition between the elevations. The horizontal elements, which are formed with a ribbed and stacked red brick bond, emphasise the horizontal grain and provide contrast to the vertical red brick elements, which are laid in a stretcher bond.

Constructed from 636 large scale brick facing pre-cast panels, the brickwork projects between 400mm and 100mm from the glazing line in both the horizontal and vertical brick panels. This 300mm variation in depth adds visual interest, accentuating the passing of light across the facade, generating shadows that play across the surface and reveal the weave.
At roof level, the facades have a different treatment and a distinctive perforated brick screen, constructed with open Flemish bond hit-and-miss brick panels, controls views of the plant. Infilled Flemish hit-and-miss panels, used on the core, provide a detailed brick pattern and texture adds grain to the façade, gesturing to the area’s bold engineered aesthetic.

The broader context

The vast £1 billion, 50-acre New Bailey scheme, of which the Three New Bailey building is a part, has addressed years of neglect and degradation.

Originally the site of New Bailey prison built in the 1700s, Salford’s riverfront had become little more than huge surface car parks – used by people going to work in Manchester – along with poor-quality office buildings. However, New Bailey is now a thriving commercial hub with hundreds of new city-centre homes and a bustling leisure scene. It has attracted major global business to a once no-go area and is now a major economic contributor to the city and wider region.

Social value and community outreach central to its successful delivery, has included working with local stakeholders to identify key local needs, including local jobs and apprentices. 54% of the workforce was from the region.

The stunning woven facades, made from class A Staffordshire red engineering bricks, complement the region’s industrial heritage.
This surface was chosen for its natural red tones and sharp-edged aesthetic, which suited the tight tolerances and precision of the complex weave. As freeze-thawing experienced by projecting brickwork is more severe than conventional flush brickwork, it was important to use high grade ‘Class A’ engineering bricks with dimensional stability, strength, low water absorption and frost resistance on all their faces.
Planned and designed using 3D BIM advanced precast technology, the complexity and precision of the weave was achieved through highly innovative off-site construction methods, with close collaboration between architects Make, Thorp Precast and brick manufacturer Ketley Brick.
This required the manufacture and fixing of 636 brick faced precast panels, using the most efficient brick types for each element of the design to reduce time, cost and potential waste.
Overall, more than 500,000 Ketley brick products were used, including 350K standard ‘Class A’ smooth faced (perforated and solid) Ketley Staffordshire red engineering bricks. In the horizontal sections of the weave, full bricks alternated with 85K extruded matching brick slips, with a dove tail positive key, to secure to the pre-cast panels and to avoid additional preparation, brick cutting or resulting waste.
The aesthetic requirements of the project also required a number of specials, including 54,000 Staffordshire red solid and perforated Class A bricks with a bespoke "basket weave" texture for the interior façade as well as numerous radials for the curved corners.

Three New Bailey is a low energy, BREEAM excellent, EPC ‘A’ rated building. This was achieved through the following measures:-
• A fabric first approach to the facade design aims to minimise solar gain while simultaneously creating a successful environment inside by increasing the solid-to-glass ratio of the facade and utilising upstands. The project has a solid to glass ratio in excess of 50%. All windows have a 500mm solid upstand below them.
• The floor up to 500+mm zone being solid reduces solar gain without impacting on daylight, as per BCO guidance, whilst standing and seated sightlines maintained. The solid upstand also provides a clutter-free privacy Zone.
• The solid wall construction with brick facing pre-cast concrete panels has a very high thermal performance, with minimal cold bridging through connections - able to achieve very low air permeability values.
• As constructed under factory conditions the prefabricated panels can be optimally produced to minimise waste and maximise quality.
• The Ketley bricks were manufactured locally in Dudley. The brick faced panels were then fabricated by Thorp in Stoke.
• Ultra high performance concrete was used for the solid panels to the core and roof parapet. Experimentation with this new technology enabled the concrete thickness to be reduced to only 50mm minimising weight and material usage.
• Re-purposing of the adjacent railway arches for car parking and the placement of all plant at ground and roof level meant we could avoid constructing a basement for the building. This has many sustainable benefits removing the need for excavation, spoil removal from site and extensive amounts of in-situ concrete to form the below ground retaining structure.
• Annual CO2 emissions calculated by Part L model at 18.5kg CO2/m2
A number of energy-saving measures have been incorporated into the CAT A base build design including:
• High efficiency chiller installation
• Office ventilation via AHU’s with inverter driven fans and heat recovery.
• Hot water generation via high efficiency gas fired water heaters
• Automatically switched power factor correction equipment
• Low energy lighting installation utilising LED lamp sources
• Automatic lighting controls with occupancy and daylight sensing
• Regenerative drive technology used in passenger lifts
• Automatic BMS controls and energy metering system

One of the biggest challenges was creating the complex weave. This could only be achieved using modern construction methods, which allowed the selection and application of the most efficient high quality brick types for the articulated surface in the most cost-effective and sustainable way, where possible minimising waste.
Offsite manufacture and fixing, in accordance with precise designs produced using a 3D BIM Model, ensured carefully planned and accurate setting-out of each brick throughout.

It also enabled some ingenious solutions. Intricate ‘over under’ basket weave effects were achieved through ingenious brick stepping with 4mm increments on the front face of each course on the longer vertical strips and 7-8mm increments on the face of the shorter length units. This avoided the need for a large number of costly purpose-made brick specials. Faceted brick corners reduced the quantity of bullnose specials required.

On the horizonal elements of the weave, alternating full bricks with matching extruded brick slips, with a dove tail positive key to secure to the pre-cast panels, was also an ingenious way of avoiding additional cutting and potential waste.

Once the bricks were cast onto reinforced concrete backing material, the completed precast brick faced panels were factory pointed and taken to site.

Limited site access was largely overcome through well-planned offsite manufacturing processes, as the completed panels were installed (approximately 5-6 per day) by a small team, without the need for external scaffolding, enabling all 636 panels to be installed on-site within budget and within the required 13-week time-frame.

3 New Bailey is currently Shortlisted for :
Best Commercial Project and Best Innovative Use of Brick and Clay Products Award at Brick Awards 2021. Winners to be announced November 2021
Best New Build Project 2021 Façade Awards. Winners to be announced November 2021