Category: Construction Industry Today | Subscribe to Construction Industry Today Feed Published Fri, Apr 8th 2016 Translucent cladding by Rodeca features on a new national training academy. Posted via Industry Today. Follow us on Twitter @IndustryToday Translucent polycarbonate cladding panels from Rodeca were specified for a national training academy to maximise natural daylight for an optimum learning environment and to show the processes within the building. A total of 575m2 of Rodeca’s PC 2540-7 lightweight wall panels feature on all elevations of the £3.5million National Training Academy for Rail (NTAR) developed in conjunction with Siemens’ Rail Division. The 40mm-thick, 500mm-wide Rodeca panels have been used partly as rainscreen and partly as a double-wall construction. The fast-track tongue and groove panels were specified by CMPG architects to meet the brief for an exemplar building for NTAR and Siemens to promote their branding and be used as a conference facility. The scope of the project to develop the academy encompassed the design, build and fitting out of the new training centre at Northampton (the Academy Hub) including an operational training hall and associated site works, as well as the refurbishment of associated training rooms at other Siemens Rail locations (the Academy Spokes). The academy balances the functional emphasis on providing a quality training environment with large scale workshop, training spaces and amenity, with a modern pleasing design aesthetic – a place where people want to be and want to learn. The client asked for a modern learning environment, and due to its location adjacent a main train line, a quality building emphasising the culture of the company. CMPG senior architect Ajay Chauhan said: “We sold the product to the client to increase daylighting into the spaces and to create a building that not only was translucent to show the processes but also unique in promoting the NSAR branding. The clients are extremely excited and pleased with the end product. “The part the Rodeca systems play in the project is an important one as the whole building is clad in them. The clients wanted a building that created lots of natural daylight to promote better learning, and to provide a backdrop for students which influences their understanding of engineering education, as the building structure can be seen through the cladding.” He added: “The building is entirely clad in polycarbonate and uses single and double-layered sections in which certain large sections will glow at night and also allow natural diffused light into the classrooms, main entrance foyer and main training hall during the day.” The Rodeca Deco-Color panels (where the exterior panel layer is coloured differently from the interior panel layers, for extra effect) were installed by specialist sub-contractor Select Facades for main contractor Clegg Construction. Two hundred times tougher than glass and capable of delivering U-values of 1.00 to 1.10W/m2K, they were used at NTAR with one outer wall in Kristall colour and six rear walls in Opal, allowing light transmittance of up to 41%. The drive to develop a rolling stock focussed UK training academy comes from a nationally recognised shortage of skills in this sector and Siemens’ success in the expansion of their rail maintenance business. Currently some 13,500 people work in specialist traction and rolling stock roles across the UK. The new academy will focus on addressing the future skills shortage in this part of the UK rail sector – forecast to be around 4,500 people over the next five years – caused by a combination of factors including an ageing workforce, the technological advancement of rolling stock, and investment and growth in the industry. Siemens’ continued success in the UK market and the recent awards of Eurostar and Thameslink also results in the need to increase and develop the UK workforce, upskill the existing rolling stock business, introduce training and skills specific to the new rolling stock, train new audiences such as on-train staff and police, improve Siemens’ supervisory, management and leadership training, position Siemens to be able to respond from a skills perspective to further contract success, and to build deeper collaborative relationships through all parts of the industry. NTAR has been shortlisted for the East Midlands 2016 RICS Awards (Infrastructure, Essential Facilities).   Source link

It is a good job the Bank of England is not covered by laws against misleading advertising claims that apply to peddlers of New Age remedies. Mark Carney said on Tuesday he had raised lending capacity in the UK “by up to £150bn” to “support jobs and growth” following the Brexit vote. That sounded great. But so would the blurb for a potion that promised to banish stress, back pain and unsightly hair. In both cases, efficacy may prove limited. First, the governor used an old standby of development economists — a fat multiplier — to generate a big economic benefit number. His starting point was the slim £5.7bn countercyclical capital buffer imposed on UK banks such as Lloyds and Barclays from March, which he has cut to zero. Mr Carney assumes this easement is worth 25 times its value in loans at a target leverage ratio of 4 per cent. Second, the George Clooney of central banking is rolling back a surcharge that cost big banks little grief in the first place. They expected to cover it simply by reclassifying equity previously held under Prudential Regulation Authority rules. Third, for the ointment to work, the patient would need to apply it to the sore spot. Mr Carney introduced the countercyclical buffer to cool down an overheating housing market. Borrowers may simply shove liberated capital back into this bottomless pit, rather than using it for something useful, such as export finance. Fourth, and most crucially, it takes two to tango. As Peter Richardson of Berenberg puts it, the chancellor “cannot generate solvent demand for credit”. Would-be borrowers, especially shrewd private business owners, will mostly avoid investing until the economic picture becomes clearer. At least Mr Carney is reducing banks’ capital costs as demand threatens to flag, rather than raising them, as happened in the last recession. The nadir of that caper was the failed Project Merlin lending initiative in which the banks halfheartedly participated. This was no more capable of magic than the great, bad conjuror Tommy Cooper. Houses of correction The Daily Mail recently accused the FT of being “relentlessly negative” about Brexit. Perhaps the tabloid should now turn its fire on analysts of the kind that quizzed Persimmon chief executive Jeff Fairburn about a trading update. It is the mood of City folk that columnists such as Lombard have in part been channelling. The boss of the big housebuilder acknowledged there had been a referendum. But this was as close as he got to running around shrieking “Help! We’re all gonna die!” First-half trading had been strong, he said, with completion volumes rising 6 per cent to 7,238 and the average selling price by the same percentage to £205,500. The analysts sounded incredulous. Surely tumbleweed was bowling through Persimmon sites as sales reps chain-smoked roll-ups between trembling fingers? Not really, Mr Fairburn confessed. Trading was good last week. Then he vouchsafed words to gladden the evil hearts of us doomsters. There had been a “slight” increase in cancellations. The shares fell 7 per cent, taking the drop to 35 per cent since the Leave vote was announced. That fall suggests investors think brokers have under-egged estimates of a 3 per cent slide in average house prices. The slump in the 2008 property crash was 15 per cent. Persimmon stock has not even reverted to its 10 year average as measured by price to book value. One might hazard that shares in housebuilders will drop further as confidence weakens and banks become pickier in granting mortgages. But one would not want to be accused of talking the country into a recession. Metroland martyrs Southern is the rail company that makes people who grew up in the seventies feel young again, but in a bad way. There are no flares, glam rock bands or space hoppers. Instead there is a shambolic service proffered by belligerent staff under managers that ministers are failing to hold to account. Around 1m people struggle into London daily via the Brighton main line. Delays and cancellations are often as frequent as trains that run on time. On Tuesday, Southern cut 341 services from its daily complement of 2,242. Majority owner Go-Ahead, a listed group, should perhaps change its name to Go To Hell to capture its apparent attitude to customers. It blames rebuilding at London Bridge. Curiously, South Eastern, which shares the station, has suffered far less disruption. Greater guilt is borne by conductors who have been throwing sickies. But the biggest culprit is a franchise where the operator works for a fixed fee. That leaves the state to underpay, the operator to underperform and passengers to suffer the consequences. The government — when we get one — should fire Southern and redesign the franchise to include incentives. jonathan.guthrie@ft.com Source link