STEAM ACADEMY, BRIDGEND COLLEGE, WALES 17
major project with the college, and first encounter with the ‘STEAM’ concept. The two-storey, £25m facility includes workshops for car and other vehicle maintenance, welding, M&E, pneumatics, CNC cutting facilities, and laboratories as well as the more traditional range of classrooms, staff areas and break-out social spaces.
The design also enables a forward- thinking approach for the college, including bringing teachers together to enable collaboration across disciplines, aiding efficiency. Connection is a big theme behind the project – it is designed to give students a feeling of openness but also connection – with copious glazing employed internally to visually connect workshops with classrooms. It’s also a building carefully designed to connect and blend unobtrusively with its richly landscaped existing setting, which doesn’t impose itself. The project’s initial impetus came from a drive by the college to better connect with local businesses. The college, in line with Welsh Government priorities, wanted to enhance its existing STEM offering, and collaboration with local industry, by creating “real work environments.” Being located next to the
ADF JUNE 2022
‘Digital Creative Cluster’ within Pencoed Technology Park meant that it could develop closer working relationships with both large and small companies.
Procurement & brief
The architects’ involvement began when they were asked to do a feasibility study for a new building on the campus. The project would be a Design & Build, via a local education framework, NPS (since renamed DPS), led by Mott MacDonald. However, benefitting the design, the architects designed the scheme to Stage 4 with the client, before it went out to tender. Project architect Andrew Baker comments: “For me, Design & Build works when you design up to Stage 4, with the client’s requirements. I don’t think it works when the contractor takes over at Stage 2; they’re not really pricing anything accurately because the designs are incomplete, prices are based on outline information only, the contractor then finalises the design process with a bias to reducing costs and risk, to the detriment of the design quality.” The college wanted to relocate existing ‘specialist’ further education facilities – requiring specialist design treatment – such as car mechanics, from its Cowbridge
“It needed that kind of maturity, but without looking like a building on a business park” Andrew Baker, Rio Architects
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