Case Study: CAD Services
Project: Wycombe Abbey School
Wycombe Abbey is an independent girls’ boarding and day school in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England. It is consistently ranked as one of the top all-girls schools in academic results.
The school was founded in 1896 by Dame Frances Dove (1847–1942), who was previously headmistress of St Leonards School in Scotland. Its present capacity is approximately 650 girls, aged 11 to 18.The current headmistress is Jo Duncan.
The school is on a 69 hectare campus in central High Wycombe. The land includes woods, gardens, a Cold War bunker (RAF Daws Hill) and a lake, and rises up to 150 metres above sea level in the Chiltern Hills. The freehold is owned by the school; the main house and several buildings at Wycombe Abbey are Grade II* listed.
As part of its ambition to develop a world-class campus, the leadership of the school commissioned the development of an Estates Masterplan for the development and improvement of all aspects of its campus over the next 15 years.
Over that period, it expects pupil numbers to grow from the current 660 to 720.
To accommodate the increase in numbers, increases in expectation and to effectively compete with other learning institutions, the Masterplan is a long term strategic programme to build state-of-the-art teaching, learning, and living spaces.
It comprises five phases, each featuring large capital projects.
Kicking off Phase 1, work has already begun with the refurbishment of ‘Big School’, an iconic grade II listed 19th century hall at the centre of the school. Design work has also started on two other key parts of this phase: the re-rebuilding of a new boarding house – Junior House – and a new academic building, The Innovation and Design Centre,. which will provide a modern space for the integrated teaching of art, technology, engineering and robotics.
In order to support one of the further phases of the Masterplan – the complete refurbishment of the four 19th Century ‘Outhouses’ (Airlie, Barry, Butler and Campbell) Benchmarq was commissioned to create detailed floor plans of the four multi-storey heritage buildings, providing the architects with a sound base from which to work up various design options.
Working with our survey partner, each room and space within these four buildings was laser scanned and the resulting point cloud imported into AutoCAD, enabling the building features to be extracted and laid down on to detailed 2D DWG drawings.
