Reconstruction of Building No 8, the University of Defence, Šumavská street, Brno

Building 8 of the Faculty of Military Technology serves for research and lecturing, and because the University of Defence wants to provide comfortable environment also to those who suffer from reduced mobility, the decision had been made to expand the one-hundred-year-old building in the campus of the Šumavská street Barracks starting with the parking place, up to the attics. The reconstruction, phased into two stages, was successfully managed under the everyday operation.

First, the attention was paid to the unused attic space aimed to be transformed from an empty attic into 11 new offices and a meeting room. In addition to the replacement of the roofing, division of space with the use of plasterboard crossbars, and new flooring, we had to think of a planned shaft for the outdoor elevator. We put steel frames to reinforce the roof truss lining up to the roof so that the elevator does not disrupt the structure of the building.

A separate steel elevator construction became a new element of the roof structure. It replaced more than 100-years-old frames damaged over time, by the war, and suffering from wood diseases. We had to deal with these phenomena during the process of the reconstruction.

The elevator shaft with the capacity of 1 125 kg is sufficiently spacious, it thus ensures comfort also for the physically disabled, as well as fast and safe transport of the materials for the laboratories. It moves up to 15 people or a Euro pallet with its operator, and the controlling of the elevator is rather elegant – with the use of a magnetic card. The efforts of remodeling the building entrance to become barrier-free were reflected also in the modification works at the parking place, which now offers one designated parking place for persons with reduced mobility, from where they can get along the pathway into the elevator platform.

In the first phase of the renovation works, some lecture rooms got a pitch flooring, which offers the students a better seeing of the board and the lecturers´ vocal cords will be spared (a sc. tiered seating). New furniture together with the conditioning controlling the temperature in the summer months then completed the transformation of the lecture rooms into a pleasant study environment.

The latter phase of the renovation was devoted particularly to moving the existing rooms into the new attic garret. After that, the laboratories were reconstructed. The original flooring was replaced with an anti vibrant and antistatic type better-suiting for the equipment sensitive to vibration. In the classrooms as well as in the laboratories, the heavy- as well as the weak-current wiring was replaced. Including the entire innovation of the transformer station.

We believe that with all the construction works we managed not only to adapt the building to the students´and teachers´ needs but also to transform it into a modern research workplace.

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