Fire Safety Success For Orange Building

The Mediacity development at Salford Quays continues to go from strength-to-strength with the successful completion of another key project on the site. Plot B4 - now known as the Orange Building – has recently undergone an extensive fit-out of the first four floors on behalf of the University of Salford to form a unique digital, learning, teaching and research space.

Urban Visions Building Control Section have played a key role in the development of Mediacity over the past 4 years and have worked closely on this scheme with architects Fairhurst Design Group and contractors Overburys to help address key compliance issues.

Ensuring adequate fire safety for the Orange Building’s development brought many unique challenges for our Building Control Team. This was mainly as a result of the client driven need to link the floors through the extensive use of open atria and feature stairs.  If a fire were to occur, this could have had the potentialb to compromise escape for up to 1500 people and so therefore needed to be robustly addressed. This resulted in our Building Control Officers working closely with the architects to ensure the building design included a natural smoke ventilation system with automatic opening vents sited at strategic locations within the external cladding system. The building also utilised fast response sprinklers and a fire alarm system incorporating voice evacuation.

The Orange Building will offer a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses including audio technology, animation, journalism, film production and creative media. The building will be handed-over in time for the first semester commencing 4th October 2011.

Our Building Control Team continue to have an involvement with the Mediacity site including dealing with the enabling work for a number of retail units, the fit-out of several floors of office accommodation and the development of Booths supermarket within the site.