Engineering Centre for Children's Health Research

Room for expansion thanks to inventive building services design

Representing the largest single investment in paediatric health research in Queensland’s history, South Brisbane’s Centre for Children’s Health Research marks a major, long-term commitment to this field of study.

Location

South Brisbane Queensland, Australia

Client

Queensland Health

Project Status

Completed in 2015

A New ‘Future-Proof’ Facility

This is reflected in the design of the nine-storey centre, which shares a precinct with the new Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital and a central energy facility. The building, which can currently house over 400 researchers, has been deliberately ‘future-proofed’ to allow for expansion, ensuring it has the flexibility to meet the state’s children health research needs for the long term. Most notably, all building services are designed with sufficient spare capacity for future demand and in a way that allows the 14,100m² facility to expand horizontally when the time comes.

Today, five of its nine floors are dedicated to research, including wet and dry laboratories. The remaining storeys accommodate a pathology service for the Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital as well as office areas, retail space and car parking. A service tunnel connects the centre to the hospital.

Fully operational pathology department maintained during construction

Engineering Centre for Children’s Health Research

Our services on the project included mechanical, electrical plumbing, and fire protection engineering, as well as security and communications consultancy. A major challenge for the team was to provide a fully operational pathology department to serve the hospital next door while the Centre for Children’s Health Research was still under construction. Again, careful building services design provided the solution, allowing the pathology clinic a level of independence from the rest of the building.

In addition, chilled and hot water, gas, power, communications and security monitoring are all provided on a precinct basis, meaning a significant coordination effort was required from our engineers to guarantee high performance across the site.