Project Title: Garden Court
Location: Cambridge
Wood Species: SPRUCE (SWITZERLAND)
Product Description
The Project
Garden Court provides twenty new rooms for graduate students and two fellows’ apartments on a city centre site for St Catharine’s College in Cambridge. The college owns a large site close to the rail station in central Cambridge, upon which, in the 1990s, they had constructed a highly pragmatic, design and build accommodation building. Ten years later, the college faced an urgent need for further graduate rooms and realised that although the existing building was internally efficient, it made poor use of the site as a whole. Previously overlooked on three sides by the backs of other flats, shops, car parks and a care home, the garden behind the existing building provided an opportunity to transform these awkward site relationships by creating a new three sided building with study rooms looking into a landscaped courtyard.
The project was constrained by site conditions and a tight construction programme required delivery of the building during one academic year. These two constraints, together with the cellular typology of student accommodation buildings and the team’s ambitions for a sustainable yet affordable building, made this project an ideal opportunity to exploit the characteristics of a cross-laminated prefabricated timber panel system for the main building structure. This construction system had the combined technical benefits of high thermal properties, fire performance, carbon lock-up, CNC-cut accuracy and programme efficiency. The timber panels are composed of softwood off-cuts sourced from sustainably managed forests in northern Europe.
The timber superstructure is up to three storeys high and sits on a concrete slab base – forming the ground floor substructure and the raised transfer slab over the bike store and plant area. The timber system includes all floor and roof plates as well as internal and external walls, staircases and even balustrades. The timber arrived pre-cut and was erected by a single crane within 4-weeks, at which point the spaces were clean, dry and light – enabling the simultaneous completion of external insulation, waterproofing, cladding and first-fix service installations.
Internally, we developed acoustic separation details with Eurban (the timber frame subcontractor) which allowed us to use only one skin of timber per party wall, and exposing the timber grain on one wall in every room. This provided savings on structure and wall finishes and has proved popular both with the students and the college maintenance team.
The main east facing façade of the four storey wing is clad with a horizontal open boarded larch screen that shades and effectively obscures the glazing in the new building to avoid overlooking issues with the adjacent buildings. Larch boards are also used as a rainscreen cladding to the ground floor courtyard facing elevations. Here, the timber gives a domestic scale to the courtyard that counters the anonymity of the buff brick 1990s building.
The project uses timber in a modern, inventive, yet unfussy way. Wood has been used highly efficiently as the building structure, cladding and as an internal finish. Offcuts of CrossLam structural panels from the site were also recycled as coffee tables to furnish the college Bursar’s office!
BUILDING OWNER: ST CATHARINE’S COLLEGE DEVELOPMENT LTD
ARCHITECT: 5TH STUDIO
STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: MICHAEL HADI ASSOCIATES
MAIN CONTRACTOR: SDC BUILDERS LTD
JOINERY COMPANY: ESSEX WOODCRAFT LTD
OTHER ASSOCIATED COMPANY: MAX FORDHAM LLP (SERVICES ENGINEER)
WOOD SUPPLIER: EURBAN
