16/09/10
SCS completes work on £100m Westminster college
One of the UK’s leading providers of smoke control, building management and ventilation has completed work on a new £100 million campus at the City of Westminster College.
The SCS Group, was awarded the £130,000 contract by M&E contractor Rotary Southern to install a smoke control system at the new college, which is due for completion in December 2010.
The new building, which has been designed by award-winning international architects Schmidt Hammer Lassen, is a redevelopment of the college’s former Paddington Green site to provide a new seven-storey main campus.
The SCS Group installed three mechanical smoke control systems, which will clear smoke from the atrium and protect the two fire fighting shafts in the event of a fire. The firm’s expertise in building management allowed the team to integrate the smoke control solution into a building management system (BMS) which also controls the college’s building services including lighting and ventilation.
The SCS Group, which has offices nationwide and a state-of-the-art production facility in Dorset, used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to verify the effectiveness of the smoke control system, which enabled approving bodies to have complete confidence in the design proposals.
SCS Group’s managing director, Allan Meek, said:
“This project demonstrates our expertise in building services and delivering integrated systems for the benefit of end users. The original specification did not have smoke control integrated into the BMS, but working with Rotary Southern we designed and installed software that enables the smoke control system to communicate with other services, all controlled through one central unit.
“We have developed a specialism within the education sector with recent projects including a passive ventilation system for the University of Wales Institute in Cardiff and a fully integrated building management system at the University of Sussex.”
The City of Westminster College provides around 250 courses to over 7,000 students in the centre of London. The new campus will feature a large atrium at the centre of the building, with accessible roof terraces. It will also provide state-of-the-art facilities including specialist science labs, a large sports hall and a wide range of workshops, as well as offering community access to new facilities such as a 140-seat theatre and a public cafe overlooking St Mary’s Gardens.
Project manager at Rotary Southern, Phil Alsop, said:
“Our original requirement was for a mechanical smoke control system. During the design stage, the SCS Group highlighted the benefits of integrating smoke control with the wider building management system and this resulted in an improvement to the original specification.”
The new campus will open its doors to students in January 2011.
