Verulam

The City of Glasgow is at present going through a period of major redevelopment activity. One of its ambitions is to attract new organisations to establish their headquarters in the city to enrich the economic well-being of the community. The Britoil headquarters building has been regarded as one of the success stories in this campaign, and is an outstanding example of high quality office accommodation. The paper describes how this building has been planned to occupy one of the most prominent sites in the city centre, with illustration of the architectural and engineering solutions adopted to meet very demanding requirements. In particular, the structural engineering aspects of the building design are given, with special reference to the problems of foundations, deep basement construction and choice of structure in reinforced concrete for the building. T. Ridley and D.S. Blackwood

All concrete structures expand and then contract because of the evolution of the heat of hydration and consequent rise and fall in temperature. If the contraction from the peak temperature is restrained, tensile stresses are induced which can cause cracking. The present investigation aims to reproduce site conditions for early thermal cracking within the laboratory in order to provide accurate data that can assist in the control of such cracking in practice. The validity of the theoretical analyses and the theory as assumed in BS 8007 are also checked againsthe experimental results. Professor B.P. Hughes and A.T. Mahmood