Harvey Court is the subject of an experiment seeking to reduce the temperatures of student rooms by installing a brise soleil and measuring its impact.

Harvey Court, designed by Sir Leslie Martin and constructed in the 1960s, is a Grade II listed building on the West Road site of Gonville & Caius College. The installation of the brise soleil has been designed to complement the architectural features of the building, which include large windows.

The three elevations of Harvey Court face east, south and west and as such the impact of the sun on each of these faces depends not only on the time of year but also the time of day.

Prolonged high temperatures make some rooms uninhabitable throughout the summer. In a bid to address this issue, engineers and architects have been modelling, drawing, and testing solutions over the last 10 months before offering a design solution.

A brise soleil made in aluminium and painted to replicate bronze has been installed on one, H3, and data tags have been fitted inside, and in a further five rooms, with readings collected on a half-hourly basis for six months.

The data collection is firstly to see whether the computer predicted heat gains, as modelled both dynamically and statically are accurate and then to record the effect of the solar shading.

A small but significant point that had to be considered was the thermal expansion of the frame in extreme heat. How is the stress created by that expansion controlled so as not to ‘snap’ any fixings? Spring-loaded fixing shoes, only two of them, absorb that force.

Estates Manager Andrew Gair says: “We can only predict what the benefit of installing such shading will be on the internal room temperatures but if the empirical data matches the computer generated modelling we’ll have a means of ensuring that the rooms are useable throughout the summer and without having to install and run an expensive air conditioning system.”

Pictured (from left to right): Andrew Gair, Estates Manager, Gonville & Caius College; Tim Fitzpatrick, Anglia Fabrication and Design Ltd; Andrew Parr, Anglia Fabrication and Design Ltd; Joel Gustaffson, JG Consulting, building services engineers; Kevin Myers, RH Partnership architects; Mike White, Smith and Wallwork structural engineers.