The site is located off Boscomoor lane, Penkridge, Staffordshire on the site of the former Lyne Hill Industrial Estate positioned to the South of Penkridge Village. The site measures one acre (0.4ha) and a number of facilities such as retail, leisure and education are available in close proximity.
BM3 Architecture Ltd was instructed to provide 65 new elderly apartments and communal facilities in one multi storey building with associated landscaping and parking. There is a mix of 1 and 2 bedroom homes proposed, 26 for shared ownership and 39 for affordable rent.
The building takes a ‘U’ shaped form and allows views across the site. Single aspect apartments are best utilised in this form which results in internal corridors. Along the corridors there are visual break outs to allow linkages to the surroundings. The proposed building layouts maximise natural light and ventilation.
The design principle was to create a place that is safe, well overlooked and distinctive with good connections and high quality landscaping. The layout respects public and private uses and integrates parking sensitively to avoid it dominating the development and public realm.
This project has been required to be completed to BIM (Building Information Modelling) Level 2 standards and all of our working drawings packages were completed using Autodesk Revit. Similarly the Structural & M&E Engineers also complied with BIM which allowed us to complete tasks such as clash detection, energy loss analysis, shadow analysis and we were able to extract COBie format data from their project before any work began on site. This made the project documentation a lot more reliable and accurate as most parties were using the latest version of a coordinated model.
