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PROJECT REPORT: EDUCATION & RESEARCH FACILITIES
TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED The project revealed many benefi ts of David Bryce’s original 1879 ‘Scotch Baronial’ design, as well as unexpected levels of deterioration
to adjacent buildings across multiple levels. However, when the NHS vacated the building fi nally in 2003, it left in poor condition, with numerous unsympathetic extensions, asbestos, dry rot and areas of active structural failure. Iain Tinsdale, senior associate at Bennetts Associates, comments: “The history of the site is interesting, Quartermile Ventures bought the whole hospital site in 2003 when the NHS decanted. Their appraisals never stacked up on the surgical hospital building, and it stood derelict for 12 years ” The then director of estates for the university “saw this as a strategic opportunity to purchase it for the university to start spreading east and west through the city, and consolidate the central campus.” This expansion to serve a growing demand meant that more fl oor space was a priority, and this “speculative purchase” for the university was also pragmatic, including on sustainability grounds by retaining as much built fabric as possible. Tinsdale explains that the acquisition and subsequent design competition was actually fully informed by the client “knowing they were going to need to use it for tech enabled teaching and offi ce space,” even though he adds the architects wouldn’t actually have an end user group until they were in the main contract works phase.
Client requirements – a ‘container’ Tinsdale pays tribute to the university’s estates department, who are a “very professional client used to delivering capital
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projects,” despite this scheme being a “challenge for them” due to its scope. He says that in terms of the brief, they were “very, very clear about the intention to have both teaching, research and commercial tenanted space, and that it had to be very tech enabled; it had to have a lot of connectivity through all of the spaces.” He says that Bennetts Associates approached the combination of restored historic building and additions with a somewhat agnostic sensibility to their fi nal function: “Very much like we knew it was going to be a ‘container’ that the client were going to put contents in; that was a term used quite heavily through the design development process.” He says that in addition to the practice’s experience in tackling often complex historic refurbishments for education and other functions such as theatres, Bennetts Associates also brought its input to the scheme from its previous integration of “commercial knowledge into academic situations; that relationship between the academic and industry.” The approach to teaching, and integrating the teaching spaces with the external coworking spaces for the benefi t of both, was fundamental to the design response. This was chiefl y done using a range of ‘breakout’ spaces facilitating further discussion and networking between students, and with their staff. Professor Kev Dhaliwal, interim director at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, explains the central teaching ethos behind
ADF JANUARY 2025
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