32 PROJECT REPORT: EDUCATION & RESEARCH FACILITIES
OPEN TO DISCUSSION Students have been using breakout spaces to continue discussions from classes held on the level below All images © Hufton+Crow
“The soffits are working incredibly hard to provide wide spans over ground floor teaching spaces, and give a fluid spatial quality to the foyer areas where you don’t have columns or obvious supports at interfaces with the existing building.” A feature marble and concrete staircase echoes its counterpart in the Outram building as “a public statement that allows students to ascend easily in a very visible way.” Henderson adds that, together with its generous proportions, this allows it to work as a place to meet, as much as a means of circulation.
PROJECT SUPPLIERS
Fair faced insitu concrete: Lafarge Tarmac Petersen Tegl D78 bricks: SDC Bricklayers
European Oak veneer panels: Furniture Group Manufacturing Rooflights (top floor): Spectrum Skylights Acoustic ceiling panels: Rockfon Polished plaster walls: Armourcoat
The next level is given over to social and dining space, with a large restaurant linked to a raised external courtyard offering further scope to continue discussions between the teaching sessions. Sitting above the foyer, and including trees and benches, it connects through to the existing common room in the Outram building and to the new first floor dining areas. A visual connection to the courtyard is given by the glazing to the main stair, which has vertical external metal fins with dimensions carefully calculated to reduce solar gain.
Above the teaching spaces are two floors of academic offices, which don’t connect through to the original building, partly because they don’t require their generous floor-to-ceiling heights. These floors are proportioned “more appropriately for office uses,” says Henderson.
Sustainable facades
The facade also helps to emulate the former hospital’s rhythm thanks to very deep 750 mm reveals, their visual solidity partly the result of an innovative “fabric first” sustainability strategy. Says Henderson:
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“The rooms inside benefit from large areas of glazing, but these are not very dominant externally in what is a sensitive conservation area.”
The reveals need to be that deep to incorporate localised Trox ventilation units incorporating heat exchangers, which avoid the need to run ductwork around the building. This, says Henderson, “allows us to ventilate the building sustainably without losing heat energy.”
Further character is offered by joinery elements within rooms, including slots for the ventilation units. According to Henderson, the inclusion of these units in this kind of vertical configuration is unprecedented in the UK. The windows themselves can be opened in summer, and in winter the heat exchanger heats fresh air on its way in through vents.
Despite the deep plan – the building is 46 metres deep adding in the hospital building – there is “always a very high level of daylighting to spaces,” says Henderson, adding “users always have views out, and the quality of light changes in quite a beautiful way across the day.”
Conclusion
This finely-crafted building opened in January this year, and since then students have been finding its open, collaborative spaces refreshing. They are drawn to the first floor courtyard as an attractive external breakout space to have coffee and continue discussions started in classes below. The sense of space and quality created despite the tough constraints of building onto a historic central location is testament to the skill of the architects in extracting both the client’s true needs, and the maximum value from its site.
ADF AUGUST 2018
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