Location: Earth Centre Entrance
Client: Taylor Woodrow
Description: Shop, Ticket Office & Cafe
Value: £450,000
Awards: NA
Start / Completion: January 2001 - January 2002
Notes:

The Entrance building is designed to welcome visitors to the centre, offering a covered arrivals area with ticketing, exhibition space, a large shop & reconvening place for people leaving the centre. The building has handled a large throughput of visitors at the same time as creating spaces to linger with a light flooded open plan space opening out onto the covered viewing deck over the river with space for a café & bar. Key aspects of the design are the use of reclaimed materials eg. reclaimed radiators from local demolition sites; reuse of lights and shelves from the old shop; floor joists and floor boards sawn from reclaimed timber & old telegraph poles used for the supporting columns. The building incorporates low embodied energy materials - wood either reclaimed or from sustainable; GGBS concrete, specified for the foundations, uses ground granulated blast furnace slag to reduce the cement content; keeping the use of metals to a minimum. A low energy heat source has been installed - A wood burning stove with back boiler behind the counter at one end heats and stores water for the radiator system; a free standing, modern wood burning stove gives radiant heat at the other end. Avoidance of toxic materials - Specifying PVC-free electric cable; water based paints and preservatives with organic solvents helps reduce the environmental impact of building products. The nature of the arrivals building with its continual coming and going of visitors, calls for appropriate levels of energy efficiency, transparency and space. A combination of structure, insulation, heating and glazing has been conceived, which combines an informative and fun building with the central issues of sustainability.