New terminal and operations building

The award-winning 4,000m^² operations/terminal building at TAG Farnborough Airport, business aviation facility and home of the world famous airshow, has been conceived as a ‘wing’ hovering over the landscape.

The building walls and roof run seamlessly into each other to create a highly sculptural building giving constantly changing views when moving around it. The building is long and thin, cranked in the middle in order to maximise views from all parts of the building over the aircraft apron. This award-winning structure is clad in 25,000 natural mill-finished aluminium shingles, and windows and roof lights are detailed to create a dynamic curved skin. The ground floor is predominantly glazed in a bespoke design frameless glazing system.

Our role

Our role was originally to provide cost management and employer’s agent roles. However, due to the change in procurement, our team had to quickly adapt to managing cost at a lower level in the supply chain. This entailed compiling new procedures for tendering, reporting and valuations while maintaining immediate and buildability advice to the project team. As a result, we have been engaged on a similar basis to roll out the remainder of the airport masterplan. Due to the complexities and need for specialist contractors on the project, it was clear that a traditional procurement approach was going to be costly, with main contractors adding significant sums for risk. An alternative procurement route was needed. With the client, Currie & Brown recommended a package management approach while maintaining high levels of cost certainty throughout the project.

To the delight of the client, the project was brought in on time, almost defect-free and below budget. This involved the team deconstructing the risk of the project by applying traditional cost management techniques to provide package cost certainty through a construction management model.