088 EDUCATION
the NAIC project: ‘It was a major challenge to bring quite different facilities under one roof. Usually they would place design separate to manufacture, separate to testing. All have different acoustic requirements and privacy requirements (intellectual property issues around automotive innovation are protected like state secrets). Tat was challenging. And having students mixing alongside these spaces was another challenge.’
An effective design champion is vital in such evolutions. Luckily, the whole project had the backing of Lord (Kumar)
‘As the digital world becomes more
sophisticated...so the physical environment should enhance the... sensory experience’
Bhattacharya, professor of manufacturing systems, and the individual who first established Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) having come to the University of Warwick as a lecturer in 1980. He served as WMG chairman until his death in 2019 – sadly, just months before the building completed. Tat top-down commitment must have been crucial in arguing the benefits of doing something that has never been done before – such as stacking departments one on top of each other, which involves bringing heavy loads like the cars themselves, or the full-size
CASE STUDY
FACULTY OF ARTS, WARWICK UNIVERSITY
Although there are clear synergies between the subjects – arts and humanities – taught in Feilden Clegg Bradley’s new Faculty of Arts building for Warwick University, their colocation in this unusual, sculptural building, filled with social and flexible learning spaces, is highly conducive to learning enrichment. The new arts faculty embraces classics, history, English, languages, film and theatre, all of which have access to the studio and performance spaces on the ground floor, as well as the warm and inviting, inhabitable large staircase that curves up through the building’s core from its flared, informal amphitheatre-style base. The building comprises four light-filled pavilions of up to eight storeys arranged around this staircase, with each pavilion offering a variety of teaching, ofice and academic environments. The staircase’s spiralling form also creates a variety of informal spaces for learning and gathering at each level.
With its contoured ceramic-tiled
façade – a deep, earthy, unglazed terracotta chosen to tone with the local Warwickshire clay – it is one of this distinctive mid-20th century campus’s most striking buildings, and it transforms what had been a dead car parking area into a beacon for the arts. Says architect and FCB partner Andy Theobald: ‘Its location required it to be a building in the round, presenting a façade to all the structures and landscaping around it. The scheme is based around the organisation of flexible spaces that can either be academic or teaching, which can chop and change, to suit different departmental uses through the day. At the same time, the intention was to draw students into the building for both formal and informal learning, with open plan areas as well as ofices. There are some simple square footprints in the plan, and the building is made up of four of them on every level…The idea was to create both a sculptural feel but also get departments to occupy one, two, three or four of these clusters.’
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