Amen Corner School is a 210-place primary school built to service the new 380-plot Amen Corner North development in Binfield, Bracknell Forest, for which Structa was also the Civil and Structural Engineering designer.

A challenge for our Infrastructure team was to design the school drainage to minimise reliance on the development of the main housing scheme. Although predominantly underlain by clay, a school-specific ground investigation demonstrated that surface water from within the school site could be disposed of sustainably via soakaways into the ground. This solution made the surface water drainage for the school independent of the main housing site.

A similar challenge existed for the foul drainage. One of the planning requirements limited the number of housing plots that could be sold to 50 without the school being built. Our Infrastructure team was able to coordinate the foul drainage of the school with that of the first tranche of housing plots to create a single-phase of infrastructure work to service both the school and the housing plots.

Stride Treglown Architects’ design intent required clean and slim structural details, with columns which did not intrude on the internal spaces, and very slim eaves details with no projections. Our structural team modelled the school building in Revit Structure, which allowed us to exchange models with the architect and ensure complete coordination between the structural and architectural elements as the design progressed. We also linked our Revit model with Tekla structural analysis and design software, to ensure that the design was translated accurately through the analysis, allowing us to refine the structure, and minimise structural sizes.