Construction of a new dedicated apprenticeship training facility at the heart of the Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire
The Oxfordshire Advanced Skills Facility (OAS Building) will support Oxfordshire businesses that offer young people apprenticeships of the highest quality and provide training in a work place environment. The initiative aims to enable between 120 and 160 highly-skilled technicians to enter the local workforce each year.
The site is located at the western edge of Culham Science Centre, in an open undeveloped area. The 3-storey building includes general teaching, electrical engineering laboratories and a large mechanical engineering workshop; as well as breakout spaces, including the double height lobby for independent working and presentations.
Ridge provided the UKAEA with a full multidiscipline team to develop the proposals from the established client brief, through obtaining planning permission, procuring the project and developing the technical design proposals, to monitoring the works on site.
The team worked carefully with the OAS stakeholder team to refine the specific project requirements and develop the final proposals. Ridge provided detailed project and cost management from the outset of the project to inform the project programme, risk management and budget.
UKAEA are very dedicated to sustainability, requiring BREEAM to be achieved for all developments on their site as a tangible way of demonstrating performance above and beyond best practice in this field. This particular building is being completed in two phases with the first complete and the second in design stage currently. Overall the scheme incorporates a number of specific Sustainability measures;
- The locations of classrooms have been carefully considered using dynamic simulation software in order to optimise the use of natural daylight whilst using solar control measures to reduce heat gain and glare issues.
- In line with the energy hierarchy, passive design measures are incorporated to minimise the building’s energy demand. For the second phase a large photovoltaic system and air source heat pump means that the building will achieve a 40% improvement over the regulation baseline building with the ASHP also able to cool the commercial kitchen and comms room when required.
- A detailed indoor air quality plan informed the design, construction, commissioning and handover of the first phase and this will be targeted for the second phase. This considers how potential contamination sources can be removed from the building, reviews the specification of elements that can impact air quality such as floor and ceiling finishes and outlines the implementation of third party testing where relevant.
