Why on earth they are not enclosed at the sides is beyond me.
I'd venture a guess that it's all part of some 'green' idea that you they'll just use entirely natural ventilation. If those grilles were made more watertight then they'd probably have to add fans or something...
I wonder if the design statement mentions it at all?
Paul
Yes, the D&A statement does explicitly refer to natural ventilation. That's obviously got to be a good idea, in terms of minimising CO2 production by obviating the need for more electricity generation, but the actual implementation of that fine principle has been woeful - surely, the primary requirement of any building, whether it's ventilated naturally or mechanically, is that it has to be weatherproof. Entirely predictably, the Transfer Deck is not.
I did have grave misgivings about the design when I saw it in the plans/elevations submitted for Planning but decided not to whinge about it here as that would just seem negative, though I did express my concerns recently about the apparently poor navigability of the Deck and the total inadequacy of the signage. However, I think Grimshaw (the architects) and Network Rail (the clients) have really embarrassed themselves by producing a building whose functionality and fitness-for-purpose simply do not look like they have been properly thought through at all. I remember seeing in the Environmental Statement (I think) that the design-decisions about local wind conditions were based on readings taken at the Met Office weather station in Bracknell! Unbelieveable! This station was a long, long time in the planning - surely someone could have said at some point:
"hang on, this section of the GWML▸ is oriented exactly East-West, in a country with prevailing westerly/sou'westerly winds, and the existing station already suffers from having those winds howling directly through it; before designing the new station, perhaps we should therefore install anemometers on the existing building for a few years and take site-specific wind-readings to help inform our decision-making". The idea of good architecture is to anticipate and
design-out really basic problems such as potential weather ingress before one gets to Planning and certainly before getting to detailled design-drawing stage; dealing with them retrospectively in the way that
NR» are now having to, ie with mops/buckets/slip-hazard signs, is just appalling, and makes them look amateurish. Which is a terrible shame, because this has otherwise been an incredibly impressive project so far.
I have to say that the more I've read on this thread about the RSAR project, the more I've understood that it was west-of-Reading track-led, and that the re-configuration of the station was largely a necessary consequence of that (though I do acknowledge that the anticipated doubling of passenger numbers through Reading in the period to 2030 was also a massive driver); it does, therefore, seem to this layperson that the station re-design was almost an afterthought (I exaggerate, of course, for effect).
I'm so puzzled by how this weather-ingress situation was allowed to get to this stage, ie allowed to get right through many design iterations, and through the construction process when there was terrible weather, to the point that the building fails within a week of commissioning, and customers are posting photos of puddles and buckets. All the actors here are normally first-class at what they do: Grimshaw, Hotchieff/Costain, Network Rail, all excellent - so how has this been allowed to happen? How did this problem get through their respective (and joined-up) quality-assurance processes?
We all know that architecture/construction is always a compromise between aspiration and cost, but surely making your building weather-proof must always be on the "must-do" list rather than the "nice-to-do" list?
