Heritage reimagined: Transforming the Brighton Corn Exchange for a Sustainable Future

Welcome to the Footprint Plus 2025 podcast series. Heritage Reimagined, Transforming the Brighton Dome in association with Iestruct E. Good morning and welcome to the Iestruct E Heritage Reimagined seminar here about transforming the Brighton Corn Exchange for a sustainable future. So you can see the panel here this morning, that's myself. I'm Jane Endwissal, technical director with Thomas Sons, we're consulting engineers primarily in the Manchester area. And I'm a conservation accredited engineer and a past president of the institution of structural engineers. We've got our first speaker, will be Emily Duncom from Arup. And she'll be followed by Peter Clegg from Fielding Clegg. And then we'll be having a panel discussion and Leslie Fair, who was a project QS, will also be involved in that. So as I was saying, I was institution president back in 2022. And in that year, I featured very heavily the need to reuse buildings. It has still been a little bit to the niche thing. People thought they're working their own corner. Let me get on with it. But it was around about that time. It really took on a lot more importance. And with the need that we have to reuse buildings, this is a brilliant example of how a building's been transformed and been given a sustainable future. I'm going to hand over to Peter. So, Peter. OK, thank you very much indeed. So, yeah, I'm going to give you a general introduction to the project. And then Emily's going to talk about details particular of the structural engineering, which is great challenging on the project. So, here we are in Brighton. So, most of you will know Brighton, Dome, the onions, etc. This is the building that we're going to talk about, mainly corn exchange. This is a stable building. This is a riding house. This is all the properties of an extraordinary guy called the Prince Regent, who is here caricatured. He was the most hated monoquy ever had. But here he is dancing away during the time of the Napoleonic Wars with his mistress, which is the reason why he's in Brighton. And he got, he was given a 65 million pound year, a year, salary to live there. And this is what he built. He built the riding stable first. He built his house second, interesting that, because that shows you what he was really dedicated to. And this is what we have to deal with. This is 1806. Why do you span timber arch building in the country? Beautiful drawing of it by Augustus Pugin. And over the years, it has been used for everything. So, here it is. As a skating rink, as a corn exchange, as a hospital, music, this is the League of Nations, 1930. And this is what it was like when we found it. So you see, there's nothing there that shows the original architecture. And this is just very briefly what we had to do. It should make an extra new flexible performance space out of a very tired-el building, obviously doing much as we count in terms of insulation, environmental controls. And there's also a studio theater on the site which needed upgrading. And all the bits and pieces that go to make a new theater, i.e. FOIA, Intinal bars, et cetera. And at the bottom here, key things, we wanted to restore the simplicity of the 1806 design and open up the original, those extraordinary windows that you showed in, I showed you in that previous slide. So, orientate yourself here, corn exchange, studio theater. The red is a courtyard full of decrepit old buildings. So there was a small demolition contract. And then what we did was, the interesting thing about this project is we're building underneath it, quite extensively underneath it, get storage space and ductwork, et cetera. And we're plugging this courtyard. So everything that's new is not got any facade at all. It's just kind of interesting. And then we refurbished all of the other buildings around it in this urban block. And ended up with the corn exchange, which is in its rejuvenated splendor. The new restored roof, Emil will talk about that, and then a new timber cladding throughout and around the floor. The little studio theater, which sat one corner of the site, was also refurbished theater in the round for 250. The corn exchange is either 500 or seated or 1,000, 1,200 standing. And then there was a little building here that you can see the back end of it here, which was a new entrance for air that we pushed out onto new road. And then this central foyer space, which is actually links everything together, including there's a new space on top of this building called Anita's Romance, Anita Rodic gave money for a new community theater space. So that was, it's interesting building, a completely new building with no elevations. This is the challenge of the roof, which Emil will talk about. All I'll say is that we managed to strengthen this roof with the use of 8, 25 millimeter steel bars and everything kind of held together. And that was brilliant. Thank you very much. And this is a section through, so showing all the stuff that we did underneath, plants and storage and changing rooms, stairs that go down and in, seating that goes back. So you can open up the whole space 54 meters of it by 18 meters. And that's what it's like now. And everybody is falling in love with this building that they really rather despised. And you can see here these windows beautifully restored, beautiful carpentry and painting work. And they lead through to the atrium, so it's natural like coming through those windows. And this is looking for that sort of atrium bar area. And you can see this extraordinary transparency into the, into the studio theater through layers of acoustical glazing and blackout lines and the existing windows. So that's the ambience that you get when there's a performer in the middle of a sort of flat floor space. This is what it looks like when it's a theater space. And here you see these windows, these kind of magic and sort of, uh, saracenic windows they were called. It was the influence of Indian architecture at the time. So you're looking through to the bar here. This is Anita's room and you're looking through the foyer and into the corn exchange itself. So, um, and then from the, again, from this central foyer into the corn exchange. And you get multiple really interesting views and reflections as you go around the building. Environmental strategy, simple but very, very simple in just one line that very complex to install NVHR in both theater spaces, natural ventilation everywhere else, roof insulation, dramatically reduces heat loads because you've got this thousand square meters of insulation gets rid of most of the heat load. Um, heat loss. Um, additional grazing where we could reduction in the envelope area. Interesting that plugging that courtyard saves you 500 square meters of perimeter that is losing otherwise losing heat. And obviously things like low energy lighting and bringing the new day lighting into the space. And the, there's, there's a energy, on body, energy component with 6000 square meters of, of FSC European oak. Um, so hopefully another 200 years of life. And we're talking about the, the structure, Emily. Uh, I haven't, we're not using that so, uh, click her so just use this I think. Does it? Oh, yeah. Hi, everyone. So I'm, I was a structural engineer on the project and I had the challenge along with the team I worked with of, um, of taking a grade one and grade two listed structure, um, and strengthening it, altering it and making sure that no one could ever tell that we've been there as structural engineers. So I'm going to talk you through a few of the interventions, um, that we did and the strengthening works and, uh, show you a bit of the construction process. So as Peter's described, um, there's lots of different components to this building. This is the structural model that we created. So in the quen exchange, we created a basement, uh, that required some underpinning for some 200 year old masonry walls. There are meter thick. So that was fun. Um, and then in the, in the studio theatre, we, Gredu i'r Egennu fel Gredu i fi wedi dew yr pan sydbar sydd yn perrukwyrt i wedi dipbrallrhyw o ranedd fel frwng đãig y litter أumb, mae synr'r rhy ffordd ac ei wyraeth rhaid. Ch Donaldrey. YmthoddOS greu maethau yn drwfr i panel,io ei cyflwyddio ac yn trPop corresponding. Mae'r rhywb yn neslawn sydd wedi'r ym gwyliad y cyflwyddio yn cyflwyddio yna ymddwn sydd â'r fforddol. Mae'r rhywb sydd hynny ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd yn cyflwyddio yn ymddwn sydd yna o'r yma. Mae'r rhywb yn yna i'r yma'r rhaid. Mae'r rhywb yn sydd wedi'r ffordd o'r yma. Mae'r rhywb i pethau yn cyflwyddio ac yn yna. Yna yn yna, yn yma'r rhywb yna. Mae'r rhywb i pethau yn yma'r rhywb i pethau yn yma. Mae'r rhywb i pethau yn yma. Mae'r rhywb i pethau yn cyflwyddio ac yn yma. our career without having any contractors going bust, and on the dome, two of them went bust. And as well as just after we deported to contract number two, COVID struck. So it was quite a journey. So I think had we not had those exceptional issues, the economic value would have been substantially higher, or an even bigger gap between that and the construction costs. I think in terms of working out the costs of the building, a cost planning, cost planning on a historic building is much more complex and less of an exact science than cost planning on a new building. You need to take into account, trying to work out how the building was put together in the first instance, and also the impact of what's happened over in the intervening decades. So investigating and understanding the building is absolutely key and working out what you can do to get the new services and get everything else in. I think if you've got decay or damage to the building or over time, if that's the general fabric, then that's not so. It's not such a big issue because you can, with careful restoration, careful repair, you can get around that. But the structure, as Emily touched on, is absolutely critical that you understand that and find ways of working around that. And in particular, understanding that at a nearly stage, because it's not easy dealing with things that are designed stage, if you suddenly decide or discover you have to work backwards. And in order to come up with the solution, the one-to-one building, the things that you don't know. It's going to be the problem if you uncover structure. I think when we were talking, you have the day, Emily, you were describing something. Was it with the roof where you had something you really couldn't have expected to find in advance? [Pause] Yeah, so the roof of the Corn Exchange was painted and hidden by plasterboard. So although you could do some inspections in the roof void area, - that made clear the design stages on the programme, which helped us understand how the roof was working. - Peter's busy nodding. We couldn't have known about all the gaps between the different laminated bits of timber until you did that back years and years of paint. - Yeah, and cost, and cost. It's interesting, in retrospect, we spent the last time with the first contractor saying, "Gotta get a big impact on the programme, Angol." - This seems possible. So we can look at all this, because we only looked at a little bit of it. And they had not priced for it, so they preferred to take little towers around. And it was a disastrous move in retrospect. We ought to have just negotiated with them the cost of doing that. And we'd have been able to get. - It's always a problem with these. - So much quicker. We talked about the difficulties of budgeting and these unknowns. - Question is, I suppose, in a way you have already answered it, about how a sustainable refit, retrofit differs from conventional projects. Is that one you'd like to pick up Leslie? - Yeah, I think it's the complexity of having to retain the existing fabric and work around the fabric. In other retrofits, you can strip out and simply replace. You've got heritage issues, and it makes it more difficult. It's more difficult to get the. - I'm sure. -. make building more energy efficient. - You just need to work around for your partner. - I'm sure you'll have to work around for your partner. - And it's a different way. - For the sustainable retrofit. - The end result. - I mean, this project started about 10, 12 years ago. So, these days we would look at the embodied carbon a lot more closely. Whether we'd have done it any differently, I don't know. The challenge with that big building is if you can imagine a building that's as long as we're talking. And as high as we're talking about now. Where we can't get any duct work, we don't want any duct work in the roof or the walls or anywhere, because they're all listed elements. The only choice really was to go down for the distribution work, ducts, and to go on top of the roof for the exit ducts, you know, for the exhaust ducts. And going down, it was horrendously costly, both in terms of concrete and carbon, but it was the only real solution given the listed constraints. You know, we didn't want big duct work elements floating in there. We'd have been in big arguments with historic England who were really interested in this project. So, I don't know quite what we'd have done differently. And, you know, from my. I haven't calculated the amount of carbon in that concrete, and maybe we ought to. I still think that everything else that we've done there has actually been low carbon retrofit solutions, but that concrete element. Of course, it was doing. It was supporting the structure as well. It was underpinning the whole building, which is rather decrepit. So, what was the social impact of giving historic spaces in life? But that was a big cost, a big carbon cut. Oh, I think. Well, I think it's fantastic. You talk to anybody in Brighton. You talk about the City Council, you talk about the Brighton Dome Festival, which is the, you know, the most exciting arts festival outside London, and really, really popular. And, you know, it's given them a space that they can generate a lot more money in through using it for conference facilities, and they opened with that extraordinary Van Gogh exhibition, you know, with the Son of Sound and Light Show. Which the director said, "Well, that's going to be great. That's going to be our subsidy for the rest of the year." You know, because art's putting on arts projects, costs a hell of a lot of money. So, I think part of the equation, certainly with cultural buildings, is finding ways in which you can use them to generate money. Okay. So, we've got a few questions coming from your audience. Please do send more in through Slider. Well, we have got a roving mic. We can use if we need to. But the first question is, what was the extent of the timber rot in the roof? And how did you deal with that? There was quite a lot. It wasn't just in the roof, but it was also in the walls. So, it's a timber frame building, which is clad in Masonry. So, we did an awful lot of inspections. And at Arab, I'm fortunate to have, you know, global experts at hand, who came and joined us on the inspections for all the timber elements. And again, there's some really needed advice. So, there were a series of inspections on St. Cherry Pickers up quite high. And then anything was rotting. It was rotting. I think it was rotting quite a bit. It was interestingly, like for life. The original construction was told up because of the war in Eastern Europe. You know, because it came from Russia, I think, was. I was going to say, should we just give a plug to Hutton and Roster? Because they were so great as timber specialists. If you've got a building with rotten timber. Have a great experience working with them in their rot towns? Absolutely, everything about it. Have a dog that goes around sniffing out dry rocks. Absolutely fantastic. A very generous, fantastic programming. Pleasure to work with. So, just going on to our next question from Ruth O. So, Purifour. We've heard that the programme went over budget, so project went over budget. mae wnaeth dau ei ffais yn un t fuzzyyd cydwl hyn. Mae hynny gwasanaethau metw e beirforth original Sen bithiad timebrewth chi dir με fe. Mae hynny gerda eu noch enquai dehaithrau Grefnas 간 neweddo echen restauratio o jest fel i greuiddor wedi un fungus at mewn niwer Perm partie Diolch发? 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