Birmingham City Council

Birmingham City Council built a new £38m office block on Woodcock Street, the council’s biggest office construction for over 100 years. The development, which included Kingfisher’s KC120 screening louvres and KW75HPG high performance single-bank louvres, achieved a BREEAM Excellent rating.

The four-storey building was built on a derelict site being used as a car park next to Aston Science Park and was designed to be a key element of the Council’s business transformation and Working for the Future programmes. It also provided an improved working environment for over 2000 staff, aiming to deliver better services to Birmingham residents.

Alan Village, Apex Roofing project manager, explains, “Kingfisher were not only the most competitive company we approached for the louvres, but were also the most helpful, giving us all the information we needed to ensure they would integrate discretely into the overall design and meet the performance objectives required.”

The solution

Achieving a BREEAM ‘excellent’ rating, the development was built by Thomas Vale Construction and included various sustainable strategies such as a brown roof, photovoltaic panels, rainwater harvesting and a combined heating and power system. To ensure the building’s roof-mounted plant room was effectively ventilated, Kingfisher supplied sub-contractor Apex Roofing & Cladding with almost £100,000 of aluminium KW ventilation and KC screening louvres.

Mounted on a counter-balance system on the roof and integrated into the façade cladding, the louvres will ensure optimum airflow into the plant room which will help to maintain ambient conditions, optimise equipment efficiency whilst also preventing the ingress of rain. They also add to the aesthetics of the building, creating a more attractive feature on the roof around the plant room.

The project consisted of over 3600m of KC120 screening louvres at a mixture of 100mm and 105mm pitch. Areas were also inverted to shield the equipment situated behind the louvres from being viewed from below. In addition to the screening louvres, almost 7000m of KW75HPG louvres were also used on the project. The KW75HPG louvres offer up to Class A performance for rain rejection as well as an impressive Class 2 for airflow. The louvres across the project ranged in height, using the Kingfisher M1 mullions to support the blades. Kingfisher also supplied eight double doors and seven single doors across the building.