Baner Workshops

The client owned a long shallow plot and an established machining business occupying about a third of it. They wanted to build workshop units for rent on the remainder, with two conditions: the units had to suit tenants of very different sizes, and construction could not interrupt their own production for more than a fortnight at a time.

The plot is 96 metres long and only 22 deep, running east to west, with the client's existing shed at the eastern end and vehicle access from a service road to the south. A shallow plot of that proportion effectively rules out a deep-plan shed: anything more than about 18 metres deep would need artificial light across the middle all day, which for a workshop is both a running cost and a safety issue.

The building is one bar, 74 by 18 metres, divided into fourteen bays of 5.2 metres. Every internal division is a demountable partition on a bay line, so a tenant takes one bay or six and the landlord changes it in a weekend. Only the structure, the drainage and the mains runs are fixed; everything else is negotiable, which is what makes the building lettable over twenty years rather than five.

The roof is a north-light saw-tooth — six bays of monopitch with glazing on the north face. That gives even, indirect daylight across the whole floor with almost no solar gain, and it is the reason the units run through a working day with the lights off. It costs more than a flat deck and it is the one place we argued the client out of the cheaper option. Cross Section BB shows the geometry and the resulting daylight distribution.

Construction is a portal frame on pad foundations with infill blockwork, chosen mainly because it could be erected bay by bay from the western end, letting the existing business carry on undisturbed. In the end the disruption was nine days in total. The one thing we would change: the service road apron is 6 metres and should be 8 — two tenants with delivery lorries cannot both load at once, and we have watched them negotiate it for three years.