Oriam, Scotland's Sports Performance Centre

While meeting strict requirements for lighting and heating, the building design provides extensive natural ventilation and daylighting to reduce the need for mechanical cooling, fan energy and artificial lighting. We designed and tested the internal environments to ensure acoustic comfort and speech intelligibility throughout the building. 

To avoid wasting energy, we designed and controlled the lighting, heating, cooling and ventilation to suit the wide range of activity and occupancy. Light levels can be adjusted to suit the sport and level of competition. Heating, ventilation and lighting is zoned, with ventilation controlled based on occupancy. For example, the fitness suite can get very busy, requiring high ventilation rates and cooling loads. To reduce energy consumption, the ventilation is controlled on CO₂ to match occupancy and we designed the air conditioning to transfer waste heat to the cafe above. 

With a natural ventilation strategy designed to create enjoyable training spaces, the large indoor football hall also incorporates a translucent roof membrane tuned to control solar gain and deliver a comfortable daylight factor of 6%.

We applied our Soft Landings process to all stages of the project, from early briefing through to the commissioning, completion, handover and aftercare, including a year of post-completion monitoring and fine-tuning. The result is an exemplar of sustainable design, construction and operation.