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Innovative Ceiling For Durham Green Offices

Posted: 11/08/2006

The Rivergreen Centre, Durham, built by local firm, Rivergreen Developments, has been awarded the highest BREEAM certification of 'excellent', demonstrating that the building is eco-friendly, as well as providing a better working environment for the people using the building.

The Centre is a thermal slab building, using the theory of Fabric Energy Storage (thermal mass) to control the temperature in the office, which reduces the amount of energy required for heating and cooling. Thermal slab works by absorbing the heat given off throughout the day by the people and computers in the building, cooling the office and reducing the need for separate air conditioning facilities.

Overnight, when the temperature of the room has dropped, the concrete radiates the heat that it absorbed in the day and warms the room again. As a result the building uses less electricity and reduces its carbon footprint.

To enable the thermal slab to work efficiently, it is important that as much of the concrete as possible is showing, which created a new set of challenges for the architects working on the project, Jane Darbyshire & David Kendall, and also for Rivergreen Developments. Suspended ceilings, traditionally installed in office buildings to hide the services in the plenum and enhance the acoustics, could not be used at The Rivergreen Centre as they would cover the concrete.

The solution came in the form of Axiom Canopies, full size panels which are suspended from the building's original structure to create floating 'ceiling clouds'. Because they are discontinuous, sound can be absorbed from both the front and back surfaces of the cloud. They are ideal for use in open plan offices, because of their excellent acoustic properties.

These can be fine tuned by adjusting the size and number of canopies, their location and overlap, the distance at which they are suspended from the ceiling, and, finally, the selection of ceiling tile to be used. The Canopies offer downward access to the services hidden behind them in addition to the acoustic and light properties. This makes any maintenance easier.

The development of The Rivergreen Centre is now complete and in addition to being the offices of Rivergreen, the building is also home to more than 20 other organisations including Durham County Council and a variety of SME businesses.

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