BUILDING CASE STUDY POST-OCCUPANCY EVALUATION
Lab EXPERIMENTS
A unique research centre opened by the Prime Minister in 2008 has undergone a detailed peformance assessment. Julie Godefroy and Ashley Bateson report on how well it is performing – and key lessons learnt that can benefit future projects
T
he International Digital Laboratory (Digital Lab) is one of the University of Warwick’s high-profile buildings. It was formally opened by then
Prime Minister Gordon Brown in July 2008, and was a finalist in the 2009 RIBA Awards. It received a number of other prizes, including the ACE Annual Engineering Excellence Award. Staying involved in the building after completion and carrying out a post- occupancy evaluation was a rewarding opportunity for consulting engineers Hoare Lea. The work has highlighted very high user satisfaction with the building, very good comfort levels, and relatively good energy performance. These results were presented to the university on the day that it launched its Carbon Management Implementation Plan. The discussion generated between the
parties involved in procuring, managing and designing the building is an example of the careful evaluation and management measures that will be required for the higher education sector to achieve its ambitious carbon reduction targets.
24 CIBSE Journal April 2012
The building The Digital Lab is a research facility that cuts across academic disciplines and seeks to facilitate collaborative research opportunities between university researchers and industry. It is part of WMG (also known as Warwick Manufacturing Group), which undertakes research into innovative technologies. The design brief for the Lab required a flexible, energy efficient, BREEAM Excellent flagship building that would offer an inspiring research base for teams in areas as diverse as manufacturing and healthcare. The building is largely open plan and naturally ventilated, and incorporates a number of low energy features from passive design to low carbon district energy. The design team was led by Edward Cullinan Architects, with MEP design carried out by Hoare Lea. The architects’ appointment formed part of the masterplan, of which the Lab was the second building they designed. As such, the university and the designers were keen to incorporate lessons learnt from the previous building into the design of the Digital Lab.
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