THE SPINE, LIVERPOOL 15
Hopkins says that they “didn’t just want a certificate on the wall, they really meant it”; this included being very invested in the design process.
Design development AHR’s 2017 competition entry was about “looking at the values of the college; health outcomes,” says Hopkins, and asking ourselves how we could turn that into architecture.” The briefing process was unusual for AHR, with the client scrutinising the design at each stage, and asking the architects what research they were using to back up the decisions. This meant showing evidence-based research on “literally everything,” says Hopkins, “down to door handle materials; it was a four-year research project.”
One evidence-based scientific design accreditation approach, The WELL Standard, had emerged a couple of years earlier, in the US, “connecting all systems of the human body to their environment,” says Hopkins, and the project team embraced it fully. He adds: “We thought it was a really great way to manifest the values of the college,” and would also ultimately be the measure of how the building actually affected its users. This was AHR’s first WELL project, but Hopkins was happy to discover it was a highly useful system for steering the design with the full involvement of this particular client. “Each of the points within WELL has three or four research papers associated with it. I was focused on it from the design perspective, but the client team read the papers, and understood the reasoning behind it.” Their interest was bolstered by the fact that many of the papers, although written in US academic institutions, were by fellows of the college, who also helped compile the standard itself.
The architects collaborated closely with the contractors to deliver some of the more uncompromising aspects of WELL in aspects like VOCs in products, as a result The Spine “doesn’t have that new building smell.” Air quality is a key aspect of WELL, and managing the CO2
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of indoor air in particular; BCO and CIBSE recommend air quality levels of around 1200 ppm (parts per million). With cognitive function being impacted to a greater degree between 900-1200 ppm, the architects aimed for 800, but in use the building has stayed under 600. “The college loved things like that – actually making people more effective,” says Hopkins. He admits there was a perception in
ADF AUGUST 2022
the project team that designing to WELL would mean a premium added to the final cost, but the architects insisted that it was already included during the specification. In the end it has only added 3% to the build, says Hopkins, including a vast array of planting across the interiors (whose specification was driven by 1989 NASA research which showed physiological benefits of plants). The shell and core came out at £1850 per square metre.
Engineering a WELL facade As a design metaphor embodying the purpose of the building, a “narrative of the human body” has been expressed in several elements: planting – ‘lungs,’ helical stairs – ‘vertebrae,’ and patterned concrete columns representing the body’s trabecular system. The most explicit example is the fully-glazed external facades, which are printed in a seemingly random, ‘Voronoi’ ceramic frit pattern. On closer inspection it is composed of clusters of polygons (23 million of them in fact, and each unique), inspired by the structure of human skin. The mesh-like frit pattern creates a “forest canopy” effect internally, to benefit users and minimise cooling. This ‘dermis’
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