Location:
BBC Studios at Kelvin Hall
Client:
Sector:
Woolgar Hunter was appointed by a partnership of Glasgow cultural organisations to reengineer a major refurbishment of Kelvin Hall, the iconic 1920s exhibition hall in Glasgow’s west end. The new mixed-use development provides a range of cultural and civil spaces within the historic building, restoring it to its position at the centre of Glasgow’s cultural life. The first phase of the development delivered public sports facilities, archive storage space for the Hunterian Museum and a new home for the Scottish Screen Archive. The occupants had widely differing needs of their spaces, so significant engineering work was required to subdivide the vast exhibition hall. A new accessible entrance was added, along with an extension to provide office space. Suspended first floor slabs were added within the vault space to house the fire-protected archive storage racks.
Woolgar Hunter the returned to Kelvin Hall to design a film/TV studio for BBC Studioworks, also within the vast exhibition space. An acoustically protected box structure was required, as well as front and back of house facilities including dressing rooms, editing suites and audience spaces. Structural design choices were governed both by the existing structure and by the creative needs of the space, with roofbeams split across two levels to allow for arial catwalks for suspending lighting and equipment. The project was awarded Best Historical/Refurbishment at the 2024 Scottish Structural Awards by the IStructE.
Engineering Excellence
Adopting a RetroFirst approach to Kelvin Hall not only preserved the historic building by making it an important part of modern Glasgow life, it also carried significant sustainability and carbon reduction benefits. By making use of the existing structure the amount of new building required was greatly reduced and, with it, the embodied carbon content of the development. For the film/TV studio, construction within the existing shell meant the studio did not require a weatherproofing envelope, reducing the volume of materials utilised. The lighting and ceiling grid in the studio has significant loading requirements but utilising the Kelvin Hall shell reduced wind loading requirements. As a result of these, the building falls well within LETI whole life carbon targets.
To navigate the constraints of the existing structure, our engineers inverted the design process. Headroom restrictions dictated what piling rigs could be operated in the space and thus what piles could be used. Similarly, for the design and installation of the roof beams, the new structure was dictated by the old, with the new beams threaded through the existing ones.