Hugh Broughton Architects is an award winning British architectural practice specialising in the commercial and public sectors. With every project, the firm seeks to fully understand their clients’ long term requirements and make significant and valuable contributions to their businesses through design. This approach has fostered success and resulted in a number of international awards and competition wins, including its shortlisted entry for Living Steel’s Third Competition last year. Unusually, the firm also has designed a number of science research stations in the extreme cold environment of Antarctica. Firm principal Hugh Broughton touts his firm’s friendly and lively team spirit that allows the flexibility that lies at the heart of its practice.

Hugh expounded on this in a recent email interview:

Living Steel: Explain your propensity for “lateral thinking”

Hugh Broughton: Ultimately every design solution needs to be achievable within existing industrial manufacturing resources and budgetary constraints. To this end we focus our designs with ‘commercial reality and pragmatism’ on realisable goals. This does not mean that design solutions can not be adventurous. We feel it is important to understand the manufacturing industries world-wide to discover what is available. The fun comes when new connections can be made: For example, linking new fabrication skills with materials or using technologies or materials from other industrial sectors etc. This investigation of new connections within industry helps us to see how we can improve on established ways of practice.

LS: Can you give us an example?

HB: The cladding envelope to our Halley VI Antarctic research station is a good example where design conflicts were focused by commercial reality and pragmatism. The cladding had to fulfill a great deal of qualities: being air-tight, highly insulated, resistant to thermal shock and high UV levels, structurally and dimensionally stable, resistant to high wind speeds and ice abrasion, but quick to erect and cost effective. Our search for a solution led us to the aircraft, ship building, rail and defense industries. There we found manufacturers and specialists with whom we could create a single skin, semi-monocoque cladding system to meet all our technical and design requirements.

LS: Discuss your use of steel framing and structural elements:

HB: Not every HBA project tries to re-invent the wheel. We use steel frames in many of our residential and commercial projects and recognise its benefits over alternative methods of construction. Steel framed buildings help to reduce construction time and labour costs. Factory production helps ensure quality and accuracy while reducing site wastage. In many ways our monocoque cladding solution for Living Steel was pushing these issues one step further.

LS: Provide an example where use of steel solved a difficult problem or was uniquely able to fulfill a sustainability strategy:

PP: At the outset of the Halley VI design, a steel space frame was adopted as the key support for each module and interface between the legs, internal fit-out and envelope. The steel space frame was the lightest and most efficient means of supporting the modules.

LS: Are you working on any further designs for “extreme environments” beyond Halley VI?

PP: Our work on Halley VI has taken us all over the world, both in search of appropriate technologies and to present the scheme to specialist and public audiences, alike. We have presented to the Indian Antarctic commission at the Ministry of Earth Sciences, New Delhi. More recently we have been working on designs for a new Spanish Antarctic Station, Juan Carlos I, on Livingstone Island.

LS: Explain the genesis of your idea to use “modular monocoque steel rings” in your Living Steel Third Competition entry, and any challenges to fulfilling the concept:

PP: The concept for modular monocoque steel rings for our Living Steel houses was driven by the idea of producing high quality, factory produced components which were large enough to be assembled quickly on site, but small enough to be transported by a standard HGV and manoeuvred by mobile crane. These larger than standard prefabricated cladding rings would require fewer junctions on-site, thereby increasing the air tightness and thermal performance of each house. As a monocoque solution, the sum of the cladding removes the requirement for a framed support structure or bracing. However, being a steel solution, one technical hurdle was the elimination of cold bridging across the cladding. We overcame this with key thermal break points in the panel’s assembly.

LS: Describe your colleague Phillip Wells’ experience in the Living Steel Design Charrette:

PP: Our Design Charrette was a very fun and exciting experience. All discussions took the form of drawings on trace over the site plan. It was a very quick process to put ideas down and we found that everyone’s thoughts added new dimensions and richness. These initial sketches became very powerful diagrams with which we could create a design. By the first afternoon we had produced enough work to to fill the walls. From there we were able to select the best ideas and finalise our proposals. It was a very productive process.