Entertainment & Cultural
Passive fire in buildings where the finish is the point.
Overview
Theatres, cinemas, concert venues, museums, galleries, libraries, convention and exhibition centres. Fire Rated Systems works on them in construction, in refurbishment, and in the weeks between one season and the next.
These buildings are two buildings. There is the one the public sees, where every surface has been designed and nothing is allowed to look like a service. And there is the one behind it — the back of house, the risers, the roof voids and the plant rooms — where the services all actually run. The passive fire work lives in the second one and has to leave no trace in the first.
The calendar decides when you get in
A venue is booked out further ahead than almost any other building type. The season, the exhibition programme or the conference calendar is set long before anyone thinks about the fire stopping, and the available window is what is left over — a dark week between productions, a changeover between exhibitions, a few nights.
We size the scope to the window and turn up able to close it out. Asking for the window to be extended once the crew is on site is not a request a venue manager can grant, because the tickets are already sold.
Fire separation and acoustic separation in the same wall
In an auditorium, a studio or a cinema the wall that separates two spaces is usually doing two jobs at once — holding fire and holding sound. Both are defeated by the same thing, which is an opening that has not been properly closed, but they are not satisfied by the same detail.
Put a service through that wall and the fire stopping has to come from the tested system, while the acoustic performance comes from the acoustic design. One does not substitute for the other, and a seal chosen to solve the sound problem is not evidence of anything. We work to the tested system and coordinate with whoever owns the acoustic requirement rather than guessing which one wins.
Older fabric and heritage buildings
Museums, galleries, libraries and older theatres are often the oldest buildings on a client's asset list, and they have been altered many times. Original fabric, decades of services added on top, and records that stop somewhere in the middle.
So the material question gets asked before anything intrusive happens, and what is observed on site is recorded separately from what the drawings claim. Where a fabric or finish cannot be disturbed, that constraint goes into the method before it goes into an argument at handover.
What you get from us
- Service penetration fire stopping through rated walls, floors, risers and shafts — for every trade rather than one at a time.
- Fire and smoke doorsets, including back-of-house, plant room and exit doors, supplied and installed or inspected and repaired.
- Fire-rated construction around bulkheads, enclosures, risers and plant.
- Ducts, dampers and cable transits where the mechanical and electrical services cross a separation.
- Inspection, baseline surveys and staged defect rectification programmed around the venue calendar.
- Photographs, asset information and certification covering the work we carried out.
The conditions we plan for
- A booked venue — Scope sized to the access window, so the work closes out inside it.
- Finished public areas — Protection, containment and reinstatement agreed before anything is opened up, and the space handed back looking untouched.
- Dense back of house — Services stacked through the same openings, where what is already in the hole changes what can be added to it.
- Acoustic and fire requirements together — Coordinated rather than traded off against each other.
- Older fabric — The material question asked before intrusive work, not after.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
- Can you work between shows or exhibitions?
- Yes, and most refurbishment work in these buildings is done that way. Tell us the window and we will tell you honestly what fits inside it.
- Will the public areas be disturbed?
- Where work has to happen in a finished space, the containment and the reinstatement are agreed before we open anything, and the area is handed back the same way it was found. Where that is not possible we say so at pricing.
- Does your fire stopping satisfy the acoustic requirement too?
- Not automatically, and nobody should assume it does. The fire stopping is selected against the tested system. If the wall also has an acoustic requirement, tell us and we will coordinate with whoever owns it rather than leave it to chance.
- We have a heritage-listed building. Can you work in it?
- Yes, with the constraints written into the method rather than discovered on site. Send us what you have on the fabric and any conditions attached to it, and we will tell you what we would need to do and what we would not touch.
Related
Drawings, photos or a defect report in front of you?
Send what you already have. We will tell you what else is needed before the work can be reviewed, priced or booked for site inspection.