Laing O’Rourke’s Crown House Technologies division has manufactured its largest-ever ‘mega riser’ offsite at its Oldbury facility, to be placed into the new headquarters of the Henry Royce Institute in central Manchester.
The £150m project will contain labs and offices for the University of Manchester. It sees Laing O’Rourke using its Select, Expanded and Crown House divisions on a tight city-centre site.
After Laing O’Rourke realised that the riser, which had to be embedded with the rest of the building envelope from the beginning of the project, could not be assembled on site, it turned to offsite manufacture. The 150t mega riser is split over five sections of the floorplan and each piece has been individually modelled. It was manufactured 16 weeks before installation and delivered just in time to site.
It was then craned in – in sections – as part of a complex lifting operation. Tony Walker, project leader at Crown House Technologies said that while it would normally take 18 weeks to install a riser of this scale and complexity. The offsite-manufactured riser took just seven days.
The Henry Royce Institute headquarters is scheduled to open in 2020.
