The Exchange

Project Overview

The Exchange was a conversion of the former Jesmond Telephone Exchange, which was built in 1949 in the late art deco form, with a metal profile shaft added to the building in the 1960’s. The building was converted into a series of residential studios, apartments and penthouse apartments between 2015 and 2017. Our brief was to provide the structural and building services design to allow the floors to be split to create 2 storey apartments within the existing floor space as well as constructing a new level on the roof. As part of our design we had to undertake a full
assessment of the existing structure to establish the existing construction and both global and element capacity.

A new steel frame was constructed to support the roof extension with the existing roof deck being established as suitable to support the load of residential use. The creation of the mezzanine floors required a structure of maximum thickness of 100mm. In order to achieve this we designed a floor plate made up in layers of plywood to give a total structural build up of 88.9mm with the bottom layer of ply being expressed as the ceiling finish. We supervised the construction of the first floor deck to ensure the design methodology was fully communicated with the layers lapped and fixed correctly, the thin profile of the finished structure has contributed to the success of the project.