Bartholomew Barn
Client: King’s Hawford Junior School
Our Approach
The brief
Bartholomew Barn is a £1.3m multifunctional sports and drama building facilitating community events from games and assemblies to drama, music and dance.
The school needed a space that would be suitable for a wide range of activities, as well as provide a kitchen and servery for catering, changing facilities, showers and bathrooms to suit all users.
The building is the UK’s first ever building built and certified to Saint Gobain’s Multi-Comfort standard, and is also certified Passivhaus and EPC A rated.
The design
The building is designed to optimise the use of glare free natural light, utilising north facing roof lights along the length of the building to reduce the need for artificial lighting for much of the occupied daytime. Solar shading also formed a very important part of the design to provide passive solar and glare control.
Photovoltaic solar panels are used within our design to generate the electrical energy demand.
Passivhaus building details, materials and triple glazing are used to provide the highly insulated fabric and with maximum heat recovery ventilation systems, the heat load is extremely low.
As with all our Passivhaus designs the air quality is much improved, helping pupils and occupants stay alert and function to their best.
Design challenges
As the building has been designed as multi-use space, this presented the greatest challenge in attaining Passivhaus certification. The Passive House Planning Package (PHPP) model is not dynamic, so the team had to decide an average occupancy/usage profile with the Passivhaus certifier and account for the sporadic unregulated loads and heat gains to ensure the strict energy efficiency measures could be met.
The team were able to overcome this and deliver a space that complies with all the different design standards for teaching, sports, canteen use, for example, and at the same time comply with the low energy demand on the heating, ventilation and lighting.
Passivhaus certified
EPC : A
Saint Gobain Multi Comfort Standard
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