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Airflow
Two key strands form the environmental strategy behind Foster and Partners' British Museum project. First, is rationalising the engineering approach at the museum and allowing for future adaptation. Second, is to do this in such a way as to minimise the intervention in the building fabric.
The museum is a Grade I listed building and the museum is in operation throughout the project – so there had to be minimum disruption. To add to the difficulty, the Great Court and Reading Room, the foci of the scheme, are landlocked by the surrounding galleries of the museum. Museum officials were also keen to ensure that the scheme did not close off opportunities for the long-term regeneration of the engineering throughout the rest of
the museum which would be carried out when adequate funds hadbeen raised.
The biggest problem with the provision of services was presented by the movement of air. The aim is to bring 45m3 of air per second into the Great Court, galleries, retail areas, education areas and Reading Room. Four primary plant rooms are sited in roughly the four outside corners of the building. Air is taken from inlet grilles adjacent to access roads surrounding the museum, via the primary plant rooms and brought into the centre of the building to the secondary plant rooms under the Great Court where the air is refined. From here it is fed via a kind of distribution racetrack around the perimeter of the Reading Room to the restaurant, auditorium, Reading Room, seminar rooms and new ethnographic and temporary gallery spaces as well as fresh air supply to the Great Court. The air returns from these spaces to the secondary air-handling units and passes through an energy-recovery system. A proportion is recirculated and the rest is discharged via turrets leading to roof level. Only a limited amounted of air is recirculated owing to the predominance of displacement ventilation systems but in order to maintain a close control and reduce energy consumption the gallery areas revert to full recirculation outside occupied hours. The building has been divided into four quadrants to harmonise with the museum's long-term engineering strategy. This diagram of services distribution provides the museum with clearer circulation and will assist it with the long-term regeneration of the services engineering. It also means that everything can be fed to and from the centre of the building via the new infrastructure, thus avoiding the tortuous routes before. The diagram is sensible and fairly straightforward. What was less easy was turning this into reality.
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