星空传媒

Gold

In the know
There were no holdups because Richard Morris made sure the design team knew what was happening

The Van Alen building on Brighton's seafront was a major diversification from the core business of Berkeley Homes. The building was a medium-rise reinforced concrete frame on a restricted city centre site and the development was a six-storey, Art Deco-style apartment block with underground car park and six new-style townhouses on the site of a former petrol station.

Full planning permission was granted in November 1999 when Richard Morris took control of the project from Berkeley's in-house land development. He excelled in three areas: co-ordinating the design team, negotiating the party wall awards, and meeting the challenges of working on a restricted and exposed site.

Close liaison
Morris was responsible for chairing design meetings held every fortnight to ensure that information flowed between the professional design team, which led to a site start date in late February 2002. He continued liaising closely with the design team to complete the superstructure and surface design and had specific and substantial input into the design and development, including the specifications and details of all the major components in the contract.

The site is bounded on three sides by existing residential retail and commercial properties and Morris successfully negotiated nine party wall awards, which meant discussions with a welter of land owners and surveyors.

The building was designed as a reinforced concrete frame on pile foundations and ground beams with rendered cavity brick and block infill panels. The top-floor construction was a simple steel portal frame with insulated cladding panels and a joisted flat roof covered with a single-ply membrane. A specialist in reinforced concrete work got the subcontract packages on the basis of the appointed contractor being the principal contractor until work started on the external brickwork envelope.

Legal completion was achieved on all 44 units in an 11-month period.

Morris also had to contend with severe high winds and storms throughout the project, but pre-planned the scaffolding and protection on site to make sure that work could go on unimpeded by the weather.

This landmark building on the seafront at Brighton is a monument to Morris's expertise in constructing this difficult site in a very short programme.

Winner: Richard Morris
Contractor: Berkeley Homes (Southern) Ltd
Site: Van Alen 星空传媒, Brighton

Silver

Creative contracting
Be imaginative, James Gaffney told his team. And they were...

St George Wharf is a large, prestigious site on the south bank of the Thames alongside Vauxhall Bridge. The eight-acre site is contaminated brownfield left vacant and semi-derelict, having previously been used for a cold store and gasworks.

Planning permission was obtained in 1998 to allow works to start from the north-eastern end of the site. Permission currently exists for 750 residential apartments, including a percentage of affordable key worker housing and approximately 200,000ft2 of lettable office space and 22,000ft2 of retail and commercial space.

James Gaffney was employed for the second phase of the site and was responsible for a large site staff. There were a large number of disciplines in the team, which had to integrate with head office, land, accounts, sales and marketing departments.

The site-based commercial and technical departments worked on pre-construction procurement and design co-ordination issues. Gaffney managed regular design and co-ordination meetings, along with design workshops with specialist subcontractors, who haddesign responsibilities. Regular daily contact at site level was paramount for the trade contractors to get this prestigious project built on schedule.

Gaffney encouraged the team to be imaginative. For example, the windows were fitted in precast concrete cladding (PCC) panels off site, the PCC balconies were finished, plasterboard for walls was delivered cut to size, the sorting of waste allowed recycling, and minor incidents were monitored to detect trends for effective briefing of the workforce. The contractors also developed methods for assessing the building for fixing concrete panels without external scaffold.

The project is now a demonstration project for the Housing Forum and M4I (Movement for Innovation). Extensive monitoring to demonstrate improvements in production and efficiency takes place in conjunction with BRE researchers.

Quality was a big factor in such a prestigious development and by liaising with all involved - his site team, specialist contractors - the quality is second to none. Gaffney was responsible for the financial management of the site and, against all the odds, managed to meet his budgets. St George Wharf also has an excellent safety record.

Winner: James Gaffney
Contractor: St George South London Ltd
Site: St George Wharf, London

Bronze

Bear necessity
A mass of contractors made david creek's management style perfect for bear wharf

Bear Wharf is a four-storey development of a dozen, two-bedroom, high-specification apartments in the heart of Reading town centre, along the bank of the River Kennet. It is built on pile foundations using a reinforced concrete frame superstructure. The building was designed to mirror the wharf-style architecture on the adjacent brewery buildings.

David Creek was selected to manage the project, having had a great deal of experience on similar constructions. The project included an undercroft car park with iron grilles and false access doors, copying the ground-floor storage areas of the mill that previously occupied the site.

Brick fan arches and lintel details were virtually designed on site by the manufacturer of the slip bricks and the concrete frame company. Traditional stone string sills and coping details, capped with a traditional slate roof and associated lead detail, all added to the technical challenge.

Internally, lift shafts, communal areas, refuse chutes and automatic opening vents had to be installed. A skilled site manager with a strong management style was essential if the project were to progress on time and within budget. To ensure this happened, Creek chaired fortnightly design meetings with the architects, engineers and building services consultants, which proved essential to the success of the project.

A concrete raft had to be incorporated in the design so that a 900mm-diameter, two-metre-deep existing brick culvert storm drain running through the centre of the site was not impeded. Historical archives suggested there was an ancient Roman retaining wall along the riverside elevation, which was of particular interest to English Heritage.

Creek established an excellent working relationship with everyone on the project to complete this high-profile, landmark building.

Winner: David Creek
Contractor: Bewley Homes Plc
Site: Holybrook House, Bear Wharf, Reading

also Commended in category 1
Mike Prendergast, Bewley Homes.