Behind The Scenes – Q&A with Ronan Pigott, Senior Director, MEP Lead, UK Commercial Office Lead, Introba London.

Ronan shares shares the MEP story behind the design of 150 Holborn, Sidara’s Showcase European HQ.

Hello Ronan. Please can you explain what your role at Introba involves?

I’m a Senior Director, the MEP Lead, and the Commercial Office Lead for the UK and I’ve been with Introba for coming up to 13 years.

Could you talk us through your contribution to the design and delivery of 150 Holborn?

My role was primarily related to the fit out element of the project. We’d had a separate team dealing with the shell and core aspects but my colleague leading that was leaving. So, I took over both aspects, reporting to Brian Goldsmith who was our regional director at the time. I was the main, day-to-day lead on the project overall.

And what did that entail?

Mainly looking at the floor plates. The original design delivered a building with shell and core floors and that was about it. No ceiling, no high level services, it was a bare bones scheme.

And that’s how you want commercial offices to be delivered nowadays because when you deliver floors and ceilings with all the infrastructure above, and then an occupier decides they want different offices, meeting rooms, and locations, you have to strip out the services, ceilings, and everything else to accommodate that fit out.

So, to minimise waste, it was decided to go down the shell and core route. And when we got closer to completion, we could give the individual member companies more time to make decisions around how they wanted their floor plates to look and function.  

They could choose how their space should look and feel depending on what was happening within their respective businesses and what they needed – Perkins&Will, for example, have a number of pods to accommodate their way of working. And then the fit out brought the floors into use and provided the meeting rooms and general open plan office areas.

Were there any key challenges you faced in delivering any of these aspects at 150 Holborn?

I think the main challenge from an MEP perspective was how long it took from the initial shell and core design to the delivery and installation. A lot had moved on in the industry in terms of heating and cooling systems. We were moving away from gas-fired boilers and separate chillers to using air source heat pumps, and Introba had been one of the spearheads of instigating that change.

But we were delivering a building that still relied on fossil fuels to deliver heat and hot water. And one of the biggest challenges we faced along the road to delivering 150 Holborn was around that messaging.

We didn’t want to rip out all of the gas boiler equipment because, from a carbon perspective, there’s a lot of inherent or sequestered carbon there. And you know, it’s brand new, it’s fit for use, it’s functional.

So, we designed the infrastructure on the floor plates to accommodate future changes, in line with how you’d design high level infrastructure with an air source heat pump solution, dealing with temperature fluctuations from a heating perspective.

In the future, when the boilers in the basement come to the end of their lives, we could swap them out for a more modern solution. The flavour of the month right now is air source heat pumps, but there may well be something else that’s better in time. And that adaptability and flexibility at 150 Holborn is something we want to celebrate.

Yes, we recognise we use fossil fuels at the moment but you know what? When the time is right, we’ve got a plan in place so we can shift and pivot as we see fit.

Scott Smith mentioned there’d been a desire to explore air and ground source heat pumps at the concept design stage but, because the technology was so new, the planners wanted us to put a gas boiler in.

Well, the other issue with ground source heat pumps relates to where our building is. You’d have to go down around 80m and, given we’re above Chancery Lane tube station, trying to get piles in and navigating around TfL would have been a real challenge.

There’s definitely a compelling rationale as to why we went down the route we did. But I think we’ve built in the flexibility to change things around as and when we can and need to.

And looking at the delivered building, what are you most proud of now?

There are a lot of things I’m really proud of. Holistically the building – and I can’t claim all the credit for this – really works. The open staircase as you go up through the floor plates and the Pavilion on Level 8 are wonderful spaces. And the roof terrace with its connections to nature and to London is also really good.

And something we probably don’t shout about and celebrate enough is that, from a nuts and bolts perspective, the general comfort level on the floor plates is really very good. There have been some challenges with some of the meeting rooms but that’s probably more to do with user management than the MEP systems.

I’m looking forward to delving into the building operations and working with Dan Cope (Dar) longer term to look at how we really optimise the building. We’re gathering so much information and are starting to dig into it. We’ve always termed 150 Holborn as our living lab and what we learn from that data will influence our own future designs.

What do you think are the key lessons learned throughout the design and build process for clients and future projects?

I think having the flexibility and adaptability baked in from the start shouldn’t be underrated. That was the guiding design principle: is it flexible, is it adaptable, and can we make best use of it longer term, because this is our home, we’re going to be here for the foreseeable future. And then bringing yourself back to those key questions throughout the process – is this meeting the brief, are we getting there?

I think we’ve delivered a very innovative building in terms of the smart perspective. We might not have done everything we wanted to do at the outset, but we’ve delivered on the original brief. And the way the infrastructure was designed allows it to flex and adapt over time.

So, when we see different use cases come through, we can bolt them on without having to completely redo the entire infrastructure piece. We can just add elements to it and onto the building information management system to start reporting as and when.

That’s really the key lesson, I think, to invest in your infrastructure. And then, longer term, you can invest in the individual use cases, which is what we’ve done and are continuing to do here.

Do you think it was an advantage that our member firms were involved in the design of 150 Holborn?

Yes, we had a very switched on client and a steering group who were very experienced in the built environment, aware of the trends, and of our needs.

And before those meetings we’d always prep our MD at the time, saying this is what we’re going to go through. But he’d always come back with a left field question that we hadn’t necessarily thought about, just to keep us on our toes.

Which was always good because when you’re presenting to your peers, you don’t want to let the side down. I think that was a really, really good thing.

And it helped that Introba, Perkins&Will, and Maffeis Engineering were all involved in the discussions around the façade and its optimisation. Because that’s working really very well and we’re reaping the benefits of all the time we spent collectively, really digging into a design solution that would work best.

Everyone got around the table and rolled their sleeves up to tackle the key issues that needed to be resolved. And the placement of the fins and the GRC outside is very purposeful and intentional, to balance opposing needs and requirements of thermal comfort and daylight. I think we got it right on this building.

So, the coming together of our companies to solve something that’s always a key issue on most projects is something that should be definitely celebrated.

The challenges actually kick started the most interesting solutions.

Yes, particularly around the noise levels. I mean, I can hear Perkins&Will on a Monday morning when they hold a town hall event and they do a little bit of clapping, or if they have a later evening event with more people up on their floor. But generally, day-to-day, there’s very little sound transmittance across the floors. And you know, the time spent on the acoustics for the central atrium has definitely delivered on that.

We’ve been in here nearly two years now and we’re starting to see some of those inter-company relationships develop more because of the building and how closely we all work in it. Which is a positive result of us coming together in one connected space. And I’m hopeful that those interactions and collaborations across our respective companies will increase and develop more momentum.

I think the collaboration that happened across all the brands is something that needs to be really celebrated as part of the building story. This is a really great piece of work.