As part of its Smart City agenda, Bristol City Council committed to create an integrated city-wide management, service delivery and collaborative centre. The £8.3million programme brings together traffic management, bus lane enforcement and public space monitoring.

Alongside architects at IBI Group and Alec French, Style worked with main contractor, Overbury, to enable one of the general meeting areas to quickly transform into a larger operations room for emergencies.

Day-to-day, the moveable wall would remain in place to create two rooms, but the requirement was that it could very quickly be opened up to provide one large open plan space when the Police and Operations staff needed to work together.

Style recommended Skyfold as the most suitable solution. This vertically rising, fully automatic, acoustic moveable wall glides effortlessly into a cavity in the ceiling when opened, taking up no floor space whatsoever and becoming completely hidden from view.

“Skyfold is ideal for the Bristol Operations Centre,” said Style’s group managing director, Julian Sargent. “When in place, creating two separate rooms, you would never think of it as a moveable wall.

“It fits perfectly in with the interior design of the room and the acoustic integrity is phenomenal. In fact, the operations staff joked that it was so good, they can’t even shout to each other on the other side of the wall and have to go round to have conversations and relay messages – which says a lot about how good this operable wall is.

“If you have never seen a Skyfold in action, there is no manual intervention whatsoever. You simply push a button and it rises with speed and ease into the ceiling cavity, and the same process in reverse – gliding automatically down into place, with automatic seals to ensure the acoustic integrity.”