London
Green Street Workspace

Description

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The demonstrator will provide meanwhile-use affordable workspace on the car park above Queen’s Market, Green Street, Newham. It will create cost-effective workspaces able to be hired by residents and small businesses to support local businesses, creatives, and the recovery of the town centre. Key drivers for the project were (1) the use of sustainable materials; (2) for the design to be demountable and relocatable and (3) for off-site fabrication to be considered.

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Demonstrated innovation

The aim of the demonstrator was to provide evidence that affordable workspaces can be designed, fabricated, and constructed in meanwhile spaces to enable them to be demountable and moved to a new location.

 

To achieve this, the demonstration explored alternative ways of integrating design for deconstruction strategies through small changes to standard floor systems. This included investigating the removal of all adhesives based fixing details from the design to increase the material reclaim and minimise waste during disassembly. The meanwhile nature of the site makes the project ideally suited to realising the benefits of designing for deconstruction over a time frame of 10-15 years.

 

Through physical prototyping, the demonstrator will also assess which of the different floor systems explored at the design stage are the most effective in delivering a practical demountable solution that works with the existing car park deck surface levels and drainage strategy.

 

During the design phase alternative floor build-ups were compared to a base case comprising of a floating floor laid over PIR insulation, loose bound dry levelling compound and a profiled drainage membrane. Whilst this does not represent a typical business as usual scenario, due to the unique setting of the project this option was deemed to be the only viable alternative that met the projects performance spec.

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Activities done

• Scenario scoping and development

• Scoping and tendering prototype

• BIM model data extraction and processing

• LCA analysis

• LCC analysis

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Demonstrated impact

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When comparing alternative floor systems, the design team focused on a timber cassette “DfD” floor system (option 2) – designed to maximise off-site manufacture, assembly, and disassembly – against the base case utilising a dry levelling compound with floating floor (Option 1). The comparison demonstrated that options 2 achieved a 19% lower upfront capital cost and 56% lower whole-life embodied carbon when compared to the base case (option 1) over 3no. development cycles each spanning 10 years.

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