Museum of Making | GCA (UK) Ltd

Year / 2021

Client / Derby Museums Trust

Location / Derby, UK

The Grade II listed Derby Silk Mill Industrial Museum was remodelled as the Museum of Making.

This £17m project (grant funded by the HLF) involved the repair of the existing building, verification of its load capacity and construction of a new atrium adjacent to the existing building.

It received five awards at the Building Excellence Midlands Awards 2021, including ‘Building Project of the Year’ and ‘Conservation and Regeneration Award’.

The building required extensive repair and conservation, as well as sensitive alterations to the existing structure. Repairs were required throughout, including strengthening of existing timber roof structures.

GCA were involved from the early stages of the project and worked collaboratively with the design team and contractor to reach ‘best for project’ solutions to a range of project challenges.

Amongst several innovative design solutions on the project, GCA developed a programme of physical investigation and load testing to enable the retention of the existing first and second floors. This saved the project approximately £100,000 and 45 tonnes of embodied carbon and allowed the retention of the historic fabric. GCA saved a further £200,000 through design of a thin profile ground floor to encapsulate existing asbestos.

GCA found creative solutions through new technology in the use of robotic wheeled drones to access the undercroft of the original Mill to enable a detailed structural inspection.

Our designs were constantly conscious of the visual impact of the existing structure.

In the design of the atrium steelwork, we installed a new truss within the existing building floor which enabled wind loads on the atrium to be transferred to the existing building, avoiding the use of heavy cantilevered columns (and the high carbon cost of the associated substructure) or a portalised frame which would have disrupted the rhythm of the existing listed building façade.

Our attention to aesthetic sense and detail retained large elements of structure on show, for example the new wind truss to the second floor was left uncovered by the Architect once installed as an exemplar within the Museum of real world ‘Making’.