Oxford Science Park

Oxford Science Park is an out-of-town research and laboratory cluster where the building stock has to support specialist scientific use over a long operational life. CLW was appointed to deliver the waterproofing design for the new building cluster on the site.

A laboratory and research cluster carries a different waterproofing brief from a commercial office. The operational risk of any water ingress, to instrumentation, to controlled environments, to running experiments, sets the performance bar above what BS 8102 alone would require, and the design has to respond to that. The strategy was developed under BS 8102:2022 with the building’s operational use, not just its construction class, driving system selection.

The commercial value point on a science park is that the cost of failure is measured in lost research, not just rectification, and the waterproofing design has to be written down accordingly.

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