Leigh Technology Academy

Specialising in sport, business and technology, the Academy is designed as a 'creative crescent', embodying four colleges making up the pastoral idea of the school. Each college is created as a 'school within a school' and links along the internal street. Colleges are paired around open plan resource and teaching areas, set as daylit triple height winter gardens, bringing nature and technology together as an educational environment.

The crescent form is wrapped by a roof that sweeps down to ground level, responding to the microclimate and offsetting any turbulence from prevailing winds as well as enhancing the suntrap form of the south facing shape.

Teaching rooms cluster around a versatile central resource space for innovative teaching and private study overlooking the winter gardens. Open access ICT, library and dining facilities form the garden edge of the building, with views to sports fields and planted terraces which can be used as informal teaching spaces and by sports spectators.

The building has a particularly high sustainable agenda and achieves 65% of the carbon emissions compared to DfES benchmarks and a reduction of 30% against part L. Key aspects of the design that achieve this are:
Orientation - the building is designed to catch low angle sun in walkways where it can be captured and reused through central AHU's with heat exchangers, whilst avoiding summer sun angles and overheating. Predominantly north facing classrooms minimise the use of blinds whilst maximising the quality and quantity of daylight.

Sealed Façade - due to surrounding external noise levels, the building needs to be acoustically sealed. However, rather than penalise the energy figures, the mechanical ventilation has been designed to maximise heat recovery and reduce heating energy.

Passive Cooling - thermal mass is extensively used to eliminate the need to install mechanical cooling. In addition to the exposed ceilings (carefully co-ordinated with acoustic baffles and lighting to gain maximum radiant coolth), the floor void, risers and building structure are all used as heat sinks.

Earth Tubes - to further increase passive cooling, each of the 4 air handling units have 40m long earth tubes drawing clean air (away from the busy road) under the school and up through concrete risers, thereby using ground source cooling to temper the air prior to it being introduced to the teaching areas.

ICT Cooling - where high heat gains are unavoidable, heat-pumps transfer heat from the ICT into areas with high levels of glazing that benefit from 'free' heating along the perimeter. This is estimated to reduce the buildings overall energy figures by 6%.

Passive Ventilation - in areas with less acoustic restrictions, deep plan, wind driven turrets provide sufficient outdoor air and air change rates, mitigating the need for mechanical cooling. The main winter gardens are key to the ventilation concepts across the school, providing passive stack effect ventilation in summer and reservoirs for heat reclamation in winter, feeding the ventilation systems heat exchangers.

Air Infiltration - through careful design and quality of construction, air permeability and infiltration has been minimised, with tests achieving a 40% reduction at 5.9 m3/hr per m2 of building fabric averaged across the whole school.

Intelligent Building - an IP addressable BEMS provides a building responsive to indoor and outdoor climatic conditions, bringing the seasonal optimisation into effect automatically, clearly displaying modes of operation to Premises Manager to ensure simplicity in operation. The BEMS also provides a valuable learning tool, developed with teaching staff and pupils to contribute to syllabus and school projects, displaying energy and carbon use information.