Height.. Limited headroom in existing offices may be insufficient for taller lab equipment or increased services distribution.. An ideal starting-point for a lab is a floor-to-floor height between 4.2 and 4.5m, with an office typically being in the 3.6 to 4.2m range.. Taller items such as fume cabinets and MBSCs can normally be accommodated under a 2.7m high ceiling (similar to what you might find in a modern office), however some specialist or larger-scale equipment will require additional headroom or maintenance and withdrawal space, and localised raised ceilings may be necessary, or the equipment simply might not fit.. Labs require many more services than an office, which normally means a deeper ceiling void.
Fume cabinets installed as part of a biotech lab fit out in an existing office.Kit-of-parts developed by Bryden Wood for rapid deployment of labs into existing office and commercial spaces.
Bryden Wood's kit-of-parts for lab design.Existing office buildings may struggle to accommodate new laboratory HVAC plant and distribution..Laboratory air-changes will be many times higher than those found in an office.
This is driven by the regulations, pressure cascades, cooling loads, dispersion rates, local extraction, higher levels of filtration, and ideally some degree of futureproofing.For Containment Level 3 (or BSL3) and above or cleanrooms, air-changes will increase further still, often becoming impractical for an office conversion.
In addition, it may be necessary to separate lab HVAC systems from other parts of the building..
The top priority should be to optimise the HVAC design with a view to reducing the amount of plant and riser space required.The Forge is a development of two nine-storey commercial office buildings, approximately 14,000m2 large, in central London, close to the Tate Modern.
It is a collaboration between., one of the UK’s largest real estate companies, Bryden Wood as architects and engineers, and the prototyping and fabricating company.
It received funding from., the UK’s innovation agency, in recognition of its transformational potential, demonstrating the benefits to all constituents of the platforms approach to design and construction.