London Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5.
****COMM: To give you a flavour of the types of roles you could fulfil let’s see how London Heathrow Airport’s new Terminal 5 was created. *****
COMM: Designs for Terminal 5 were created by architects from Richard Rogers Partnership, who won the design competition that BAA launched for the new terminal back in 1989.
COMM: As with all projects, before any building works could take place a site analysis would have been carried out to find out what the soil conditions were and what loads the ground could support so that the foundations could be designed.
COMM: Terminal 5 is more than a single building. It comprises the main terminal known as T5A, T5B which is a satellite building, an energy centre, a multi-storey car park and the UK’s tallest air traffic control tower.
COMM: To make sure these buildings stand up to outside pressures such as wind, rain and storms, and internal loads such as floors, people or equipment, the architects collaborated with a team of structural engineers from leading engineering consultancy, Arup.
DERVILLA: On T5 there’s a number of really nice examples of how architects and engineers collaborated together. The T5A roof is one that’s really close to my heart and one that I really enjoyed working on. The T5A roof is about 160 metres in span, a beautiful waveform roof.
COMM: The roof is made up of six sections each weighing up to 2500 tonnes, that’s the equivalent of 200 elephants! The main central arches were built on the ground at Heathrow and then jacked up into position.
DERVILLA: In the case of the roof the reason why we didn’t want to use cranes was because we were above the radar ceiling and we would have effected Heathrow’s operations so we had to erect the roof while staying below the radar ceiling so hence jacking it up rather than lifting it up.
COMM: Once the major structures were in place and the buildings were enclosed and weather-tight it was time for services such as heating, ventilation, lighting and water to be installed. These systems were designed by building services engineers who always have one eye on the environment.
DERVILLA: T5A .. is basically a glass box to maximise the amount of daylight coming into the building and minimise the amount of lighting and energy used. ..Also the equipment within the building such as the baggage handling equipment has motors which turn off when they’re not in use .. And another very interesting thing about T5 is called rainwater harvesting, so all the rain water is collected off the roofs of the buildings and then used within the building for such things as flushing toilets.
COMM: So the terminal is accessible to the public a well thought through infrastructure of road, rail, tunnel and underground links was designed by civil engineers.
COMM: This included an extension to the Piccadilly Line, an extension to the Heathrow Express, a spur road to London’s M25 ring road and an airside tunnel to transport baggage.
COMM: For things to work well on site good financial and time management is essential. When you’re dealing with a budget of £4.3 billion as BAA are with Terminal 5 you can’t afford to get things wrong.
COMM: Cost consultants, also known as quantity surveyors, use the architects’ and engineers’ plans to work out exactly what quantity of labour, materials and equipment is needed to make the project a reality and meet the client’s budget.
COMM: Then project planners devise a realistic timetable which details how and when things are to be built. Every single item that arrives on site is planned to the hour, with 100 deliveries being made every hour you can see how valuable this planning is.
COMM: For Terminal 5 to be built successfully all the construction professionals need to collaborate and senior managers such as Dervilla act as their team leader.
DERVILLA: My role at Terminal 5 was firstly to come out here and build a team …. So it was to bring together the engineering skills to develop the designs then to supervise the work as it happens on site and support the site teams and that was fundamentally my engineering role. I also … worked for BAA as head of design management … and that work involved understanding issues that evolved between teams to resolve those issues and seeing if all the teams kept on time.
COMM: In a busy year, Terminal 5 will serve more than 30 million passengers making it one of the ten biggest airport terminals in Europe. Working as a construction professional on a project like this, you’re serving the public and creating a modern icon.