Project of the Year - Healthcare
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This award recognises and celebrates buildings that most effectively demonstrate high levels of user satisfaction and comfort while delivering outstanding measured building performance, as well as the work and dedication of the project team. Projects had to have been completed between 1 June 2018 and 31 August 2020.
Winner: Clatterbridge Cancer Centre – AECOM
Clatterbridge Cancer Centre is a £162m, 110-bedroom specialist cancer hospital in central Liverpool. The brief was to design a visually striking facility that creates a positive, uplifting environment centred on patient and staff needs.
The BREEAM Excellent design integrated modern methods of construction (MMC) and standardisation to maximise the building’s flexibility and adaptability. It also helped to reduce material wastage, as well as the number of onsite trades required.
The centre’s strong connection to the external environment is achieved through a glazed curtain walling system, atriums and courtyard spaces, which maximise natural lighting to patient areas and offer views across the city. Patients are able to enjoy fresh air within a Winter Garden, located at basement level, and outdoor terraces accessed from inpatient wards and chemotherapy suite.
Cancer patients can be sensitive to light and temperature, as well as to room air movement. So Aecom has worked hard to ensure the building’s façade systems give good levels of natural light and reduce glare without compromising thermal comfort. Patients and staff can control the internal environment to suit individual needs through local temperature and light-dimming controls.
The cancer centre incorporates a naturally ventilated entrance area, circulation spaces and basement waiting areas, where air is introduced through glazed roof lights at the head of a central courtyard and atrium.
Energy and carbon saving measures identified to date relate to reducing the internal space temperature within spaces that incorporate active chilled beam systems, and reviewing the operating hours of the site’s combined heat and power plant.
Vertically stacked plantrooms ensure HVAC plant is located near to the departments it serves, maximising the MMC potential and future adaptability. Such ‘plant towers’ have significant benefits, including increased accessibility for maintenance, a reduction in materials and embodied carbon, increased controllability, and reduced operational carbon, energy and running costs.
Aecom has developed key performance indicators for operational energy (kWh·m⁻² per year) and embodied carbon (900kgCO2e/m²), and advocated integrating plant towers that are made off site, to achieve net zero carbon targets.