Celsius® 355 Hollow Section at St Mary’s Sports Centre

Celsius® 355 Hollow Section at St Mary’s Sports Centre

Tata Steel’s Celsius® 355 Elliptical Hollow Section is used to striking effect at St Mary’s University College's sports centre’s strength and conditioning suite.

Architect, Rivington Street Studio, was asked to design a new suite of sports buildings for St Mary’s University College. The sports centre was to meet the needs and expectations of elite athletes.

The architect’s design was for three buildings arranged in a cluster: a large sports hall; a strength and conditioning suite and an administration block. The strength and conditioning suite was designed as a long, undulating form with a large canopy over a common entrance to the sports centre.

The internal, pre-cast concrete walls of the strength and conditioning suite cantilever off the foundations and are independent from the roof. The roof uses engineered timber beams spanning nine metres between undulating steel edge beams.

The edge beams are supported by rakedpairs of Celsius® 355 Elliptical Hollow Section columns. The hot-finished steel columns, in varying lengths up to ten metres, were fabricated in pairs off-site and were easily installed. “The elliptical columns present an evocative structural athleticism to the building,” says Malcolm Brady. Principal for structural engineers, Michael Barclay Partnership.

Hot-finished circular hollow steel section is used to form an innovative diagrid roof frame in the main sports hall. It is both an efficient and visually stunning solution.

The diagrid is an assembly of sub-frames, all of the same length and depth. They are fabricated from the same circular hollow sections. Each is supported by the other with simple connections made in the middle of the sub-frame.

In-plane stiffness is provided by the combination of frame depth and arrangement and the profile decking fixed to the top chord. It means lateral loads are shed to the four walls without the need for horizontal bracing members. The depth of the structure controls vertical deflections under gravity and environmental loads.

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