The Diamond

The Diamond, Sheffield University’s largest investment, will be a new engineering building with specialist teaching facilities. The building will also house a range of seminar rooms, lecture theatres, and open-plan learning spaces.

Billington Structures is fabricating and providing the steel for the atrium roof, link bridges and the striking façade, designed by RMJM Ltd. Balfour Beatty is the main contractor on this £50 million teaching facility. The project has a complex design and build, from the initial ground phase through to the installation of services.

The six storey building will include specialist laboratories, lecture theatres, large flexible teaching spaces, and integrated formal and informal learning environments. It provides 5,000 study with spaces, as well as a chemical engineering pilot plant and analytics laboratories, an aerospace simulation lab and a virtual reality suite.

As part of the installation, 214 rotary bored piles through weak rock and coal seams to support the new building. The unusual façade was created with an exoskeleton made up of over 10,000 anodised aluminium components, which gives the building its shape and name.

During the complex construction phase, over 750 engineering students from Sheffield University will be given a unique opportunity to learn on site. This will provide them with hands on experience on an innovative and complex steel structure to study during the course of it being constructed.

Another challenge as part of this project was it in an extremely confined location and there was a large amount of structural steel on site.