"Soap Bubble" Building Designed as Model of Sustainability
John Simpson | July 24, 2016Construction has been completed on Newcastle University’s The Key, an innovative tensile fabric building whose design was inspired in part by a soap bubble. The building is the first fabric structure to be used as a heated work space in the UK.
“Given a set of fixed points, a soap film will spread naturally between them to offer the smallest achievable surface area,” explains Peter Gosling, professor of computational and structural mechanics at Newcastle University. “But more than that, the shape is also incredibly strong, so the resulting design is not only extremely efficient in terms minimizing the materials it uses, but also very resilient."
The roof canopy is supported by a tri-star mast and is designed to maximize natural light and reduce energy use through passive ventilation. Image credit: Arup Group.mely lightweight. A triple-skin fabric structure, the building features a single, open-plan interior space with a curved ceiling 18 meters high. The roof canopy—based on that of the Institute for Lightweight Structures building, in Stuttgart—is supported by a tri-star mast and is designed to maximize natural light and reduce energy use through passive ventilation.
The building's fabric is similar to that used for the roof of London's Olympic Stadium and acts as both cladding and support while being extremely lightweight. Together with the use of exterior timber, the structure's design—developed by Arup Group and Space Architects—allows for minimal use of high-carbon-footprint materials, such as steel and concrete.
According to Gosling, The Key is the culmination of 15 years’ research on fabric structures at Newcastle University and incorporates detailed environmental, structural and laser point displacement monitoring. The university’s first building on Science Central—Newcastle's new urban innovation hub and intended as an exemplar of urban sustainability—The Key is also the first structure of its kind in the north of England to meet the UK's newest Building Regulation energy standards, says Gordon Mungall, structural engineer and associate director at Arup.