This proposed Faculty of Management building is based on the idea of a thermally comfortable space achieved through reasonable passive means. We reclaimed some of the structural mass of the existing building on its site, and redeployed it as a thematic and critical systems component of our design.
The operation of the building depends on the thermal mass wall that runs the length of its spine. This mass—made of slurry containing crushed brick and concrete—works as thermal ballast for the building, helping it to maintain a steady temperature through divergent external temperature changes.
In addition to the thermal mass wall, we also specified a ventilation system that is aided through passive means, earth tubes to assist in heating incoming fresh air, and a rainwater recapturing system to reduce our dependence on mains supply water. While not every aspect of this building is as green as could be imagined, we believe it represents a reasonable synthesis of sensitive approaches to design, and treads considerably lighter on its site than might otherwise have been conceived.
The balancing effect of the mass wall enabled us to specify a building that gives control of comfort levels to the users, which can use its ballast to conduct heat from areas where it is in surplus, to areas where it is required. While a lecture room is full, the heat can be transferred through the building’s spine to less heavily occupied rooms such as offices, which would otherwise require increased heat loads.This dynamic control, based on the redeployment of waste material from the existing site, is the compelling feature of our proposal.