The £10 million Aberdeen College Construction Training Facility has opened to students.

Designed as the new main building on the Altens campus to relocate construction trade courses onto the same site as engineering, completion allows for the refurbishment of the existing Altens Buildings to facilitate estate rationalisation and to bring ASET (Aberdeen Skills and Enterprise Training) from an adjacent site in Altens onto one complete campus.

The new facility designed by Archial, one of the country’s largest architectural practices and a member of the global Ingenium Group of companies, contains workshops and classrooms for joinery, brickwork, painting and decorating, and plumbing courses, as well as a new library, learning resource centre, fitness suite and communal eating areas.

Archial associate Ricky Connell said: “The basis of the college layout is to reform the urban streetscape to Minto Avenue and Minto Drive respecting the topography of the site. The redevelopment of the site, whilst integrating with the longer term masterplan, aims to enable all future stages and development goals to be achieved. It also creates significantly improved access/egress from the site, allowing for more efficient parking and open spaces within the campus itself.

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“The communal area is conceived as a linear strip or ‘street’, which links all the parts of the college, as well as providing a buffer to the car parking. The street provides a series of high quality landscaped spaces for casual social interaction, vital to the life of any educational campus."

He continued: “The building is predominately two storeys with a central core of three storeys. The entrance core houses reception, staff and student common rooms, refectory and fitness suite. The two wings, which house the workshop areas and traditional college areas, can be locked down out of hours to allow only essential core areas to operate and hence reduce services requirements, whilst providing the flexibility and opportunity to use core areas for non-educational purposes.

“To help reduce the mass of the building, the elevations are designed as lightweight pavilions, set on a robust ‘stone’ plinth. The use of masonry on the ground floor and lighter cladding materials on the upper floors makes reference to the indigenous buildings in the surrounding area, whilst also mirroring the internal usage.”

Given Aberdeen College’s pronounced sustainability agenda, a key element of the design brief was that the building would incorporate all the elements required to achieve a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating. To that end, the building incorporates a variety of CO2-reducing measures including the installation of solar panels, a 25KW wind turbine, natural ventilation, modulated lighting, insulation levels higher than building regulations, and radiant heat in the workshops in place of blown heat. Rain water is collected from the roof for use in the toilet cisterns.

The facility marks the first phase of the college’s comprehensive estates development strategy. Aberdeen College has about 30,000 enrolments each year and around 5,500 full-time students.

Archial is an international architectural specialist with public and private-sector clients. Its diverse portfolio includes work in corporate, education, government, healthcare, industrial, mixed-use, residential, retail and transport sectors and it employs approximately 300 employees in offices throughout England and Scotland. The award winning Archial organisation has been known for delivering intelligent solutions that combine creative excellence with commercial success.

(GK)