Description

Part A: Conduct a conceptual design study, as described in the brief below. 

Part A: Conceptual design study You have been appointed as the structural engineer to design a four storey office building in the Uxbridge Business Park, which typically employs 200 people at any one time. The client is a commercial estates owner and operator and they have commissioned your firm to do an initial structural design. There are a number of requirements of the building. The ground floor should include a reception space as well as a conference/meeting room which can accommodate up to 100 people as well as several smaller meeting rooms. It must also have a number of smaller office spaces, two common rooms and a bar/restaurant, as well as the required service areas. The remaining space on the ground floor should be leisure facilities (see Figure 1). Access to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floors is via lifts or a staircase. There must be a suitable number of lifts and staircases. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd floors comprise meeting rooms and offices as well as corridors and other service rooms (see Figure 2). The client wishes the building layout to remain reasonably flexible to allow for future changes in demand (e.g. more or less office spaces) and therefore requires a structural arrangement that does not compromise their ability to alter to width and mix of office spaces. The depth of the floors needs to be as small as practicably possible to minimize the overall height of the building. All servicing plant including water tanks, boilers and lift mechanisms are to be located at roof level. It is up to you, as an engineer, to design the required dimensions of the building according to Eurocode 3 but, of course, costs need to be minimized. What is your conceptual design to be presented to your client?