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Sky Central
A flagship building at the heart of BskyB’s headquarters in Osterley, West London, Sky Central houses over 3,500 employees. Designed in the spirit of openness, flexibility and communication the 41,000m² development is set to encourage the flow of people and ideas across all departments.
About this project
Sky Central is a mixed-use scheme encompassing office space, studios and production facilities together with research and development zones. Open and flexible spaces are organised in clusters of neighbourhoods creating a fluid workspace, where creative, technical, production and corporate are merging.
Use of Timber
The Sky Central building is the largest timber roof cassette projects in the UK. It consists of 7,500 linear metres of glulam beams and just under 16,000m2 of large timber roof cassettes with pre-installed gutters. A reinforced concrete frame builds the main structure with perimeter columns and cores extending up to the roof level to support the long spanning rooftop structure. Primary steel beams and timber fins support the lightweight roof deck with feature skylights.
The timber cassettes were manufactured and assembled offsite in controlled factory conditions. This improved the health and safety aspects of the build, enabling work to be done at ground level rather than at height, which is not only safer but permits a higher level of accuracy. The rapid rate of installation proved beneficial to this project with up to 600m2 of timber cassettes erected per day.
As the development falls under the Heathrow flight path, acoustic resistance was essential to minimise disruption due to the buildings end usage. The use of engineered timber cassettes for the build allowed an excellent reduction in airborne sound. The underside of the cassettes incorporated a combination of acoustic fleece cladding and mineral wool, and were topped with a perforated metal liner to produce the best sound absorption. The cassettes were fixed down by screwing through the cassettes into the glulam around the perimeter of the cassette. The joints were then sealed and made weather tight via a sealed jointing approach.
The new development on the Sky Campus comprises Sky Central, BSkyB Believe in Better Building and BSkyB Health and Fitness.
Further information