By Helen Buckingham, Senior Project Manager – WSP, and Gary Clark, Principal Lead for Science and Technology – HOK.
The superstructure of a building typically accounts for 60-70% of its embodied carbon, so retrofit is a major pillar of the construction industry’s response to the climate crisis. Industrial buildings with large, clear spans lend themselves to retrofitting with modular, offsite construction techniques and enable contractors to work inside whatever the weather. With more funding for life sciences developments in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK can fast track their response by rapidly retrofitting industrial buildings into state-of-the-art labs.
As part of the UK Government’s response to the pandemic, WSP and HOK worked with MACE to fast-track the transformation of the former Axiom warehouse in Royal Leamington Spa into an ultrahigh-throughput laboratory – a megalab. The Rosalind Franklin Laboratory is one of the largest diagnostic testing facilities in the world, incorporating nine separate lab lines capable of processing thousands of tests a day.
Compressing a programme from 30 months into an extremely short timeframe of less than a year might not be possible for every project outside times of crisis, but we believe there are still plenty of lessons that can be applied to future projects. And the biggest of those is that the traditional marathon approach to design needs to become a sprint.
Instead of following the usual linear process through design, tender and so on, we tackled everything simultaneously ¬– briefing with the client, sketching concepts, coordinating services, and speaking to contractors and the supply chain. Crucially, the client needs to be able to keep up with the pace, being clear about what they want from the outset and reacting immediately to questions. To help with this, we used charrettes – short, intense design meetings where we sketched out ideas and implemented client feedback in real time, securing important decisions by the end of the session.
Fast-track projects need to use the latest digital approaches to collaborative design. The design teams worked to BIM Level 2, touching on Level 3, using a federated Revit model and making use of BIM 360, before being passed to the supply chain to develop design to Level 4/5 where required. This meant that everybody was effectively working in the same model and collaborative space – backed by daily coordination meetings – it sped up cooperation across the team and supply chain. This can be replicated on future projects to aid coordination, prior to construction starting.
A strong rhythm of communication across the project team also helps keep things flowing. We held twice-daily project meetings, chaired by the client, but meetings alone are no substitute for embedding the right culture. To keep up the pace you need one team with a common goal, people who collaborate and are open – particularly to challenging others and to being challenged themselves. A collaborative working charter, which all team members signed up to, helped embed these behaviours.
There are barriers that put the brakes on any project, including the fact that you can only ever go as fast as the people shouldering the risks are willing to go. These can be overcome, though – the increasing use of project insurance in the US points to a potential solution for the issue of risk. With this in place, there need be nothing holding the team back from their sprint.
Future projects are, we hope, unlikely to be driven by a global emergency or to happen during a national lockdown with design teams working from home and always available. But there’s no reason why some of the sprint-design approaches we used for the Rosalind Franklin Laboratory shouldn’t be applied again to transform other industrial buildings quickly, cost-effectively, and sustainably to meet the demand for high-quality new labs.
