American Air Museum

Heritage listing

Details Museum exhibition hall, built in 1995-1997 to the designs of Sir Norman Foster and Partners, with Ove Arup and Partners as consulting engineers and John Sisk and Son as main contractor. A contemporary war memorial sculpture entitled ‘Counting the Cost’ by Renato Niemis lines the ramped walkway leading to the main entrance. MATERIALS: the building's roof is constructed from precast concrete panels stitched together with in-situ reinforced concrete and covered with a waterproof membrane. Its foundations, floor slab, A-frame abutments and retaining walls, the latter covered by a grassed, earthen bank, are all of in-situ reinforced concrete. A glazed curtain wall forms its principal façade. PLAN: the building, which stands on a north-west to south-east axis, is a half-ellipse on plan, rising from its narrow north-west end, where a low entrance way is cut into the grassed, earthen bank, to a tall, glass curtain wall that cuts off the ellipse just before its mid-point. STRUCTURE: the form of the American Air Museum is that of a giant concrete shell partly buried in a raised landscape. Its curved roof, which spans a distance of 90m, consists of a single composite system made from two precast concrete shells measuring 100mm thick and spaced 900mm apart. Adopting the geometry of a torus (see HISTORY section), it consists of a total of 924 precast panels, with the lower shell being formed of 274 curved panels with an inverted T-shaped cross-section (10m long by 2m wide). These panels support 650 curved rectangular panels (3m long by 1.9m wide) forming the top section. Forces from the roof are collected into an in-situ curved upper concrete ring beam and are then passed through an aluminium-framed clerestory, which varies in width from 500mm at the front (south-east) of th

From the Historic England List Entry under OGL v3.