Changing places

University of the West of England
When UWE moved to phase 2 of building its faculty of the built environment, it could simply have extended the ground-breaking phase 1. But it decided to start afresh, repeating the best elements of the first phase and introducing new ones

Words Patrick Hannay | Photos Photosignals

For what could have been essentially a phase 2 extruded extension of White Design’s excellent phase 1 building for the University of the West of England’s faculty of the Built Environment( RIBAJ September 2002) you might have expected the same design and build team to simply refine the type. But nothing is that simple in 21st century procurement.
UWE Estates felt that with the product design department joining the mix of environmental/ spatial users, and demand for a particular lecture theatre plus a ground floor public café set along a new primary route from student residences to the rest of the university, this needed more than a simple ‘repeat’ design. 

On phase 1, White Design broke new ground at UWE with a building whose low carbon performance and construction has no doubt inspired many others and been a teaching tool to countless students. But this phase 2 required a new competition for the university’s ‘tried and tested’. Stride Treglown was appointed concept architect and then became novated to Wilmott Dixon as technical architect with Hoare Lea as engineer all on a GC Works design and build (without quantities) contract.

Stride Treglown has been polite and intelligent. The new building’s proportions and overall roof profile and finish pay homage to its predecessor. The essence of the phase 1 three storey, north-south cross section, with its appropriate good daylight, north-facing studio spaces, opening onto generous atrium teaching/reviewing /circulation space, has been repeated. It works, so why change it – although this time round there is more generous upper level circulation, which doubles as teaching project/reviewing/display spaces, and some south facing studios. The quality of light, the exposure of well-organised services, the strategy of using colour as forceful punctuation, and the sense of well thought-out spatial generosity, is also appropriately contiguous with phase 1.

Need for change
But the differences are telling. Some are due to different use demands and opportunities, some to differences of professional judgement on the best low energy environmental performance, and some are inevitably mere stylistic preference.

The windowless south-facing enclosure to the lecture theatre with its noisy adjacent café, offered another chance to install a 300mm thick ‘ModCell Lite’ pre-fabricated timber framed straw-bale walling system, assembled in a ‘flying factory’ on a farm, 10 miles from site. The panels are then faced with 35mm Heraklith board and a 16mm render. To vent the lecture space a series of ceiling mounted fabric ducts bring air from a ground coupled ventilation system (a maze of buried pipes in land outside adjacent to the theatre – a system by Rehau). There are no roof mounted PV’s to power the fans even though the roof section offers such a possibility. Appropriate man-safe systems have been installed to allow retro-fitting. The bio-fuel boiler runs on recycled cooking fat from a local supplier.

In contrast to phase 1 the south elevation is now stepped, with a first floor external brise soleil hung from deep roof eaves, protecting south facing studios and technician’s suites, with cross vent again, but not to the yellow stacks. These spaces are stepped out to shade the ground floor lecture theatre wall below, and part of the outside seating area to the café – all differences to phase 1. The rainscreen to all elevations has shifted from terracotta ceramic to a composite kiln-fired clay and slate dust panel from Ibstock, claimed to help meet reclaimable/ recyclable targets. It clearly distinguishes phase 1 from phase 2, but was that really so important given that both phases are so clearly socially and educationally complimentary?

Hot and cold
Although phase 1 uses opening windows without any problem, the engineers on phase 2 insisted on cross ventilation with below-window external louvre panels, and BMS controlled (with override) ventilation damper units internally. The incoming air passes over floor-mounted radiators, moving across the room through wall vents to concrete block vertical stacks between the studios and the atrium. There are no heat exchangers at the top of the stacks, nor wind cowls to improve efficiency. This system, coupled with motorised top vents in the atrium spaces, allows for night cooling in the summer. The spatial benefits of chimneys are the adjacent alcoves, and there are invaluable generous storage spaces between the yellow painted stacks to service the atrium review spaces. This is a plus, but were all those extra venting gizmos really necessary just to ventilate north facing studios, which are mostly unoccupied in the summer months? Inevitably the mass of floor/ceiling slabs are exposed with a smart system of suspended services and dimmable lighting panels, but curiously they do not appear to be switched in bands from the windows inwards.

In all the attempts to get BREEAM excellence and complex Wrap calculations with UWE setting a 10% target and Wilmott Dixon and Stride electing for 20%, it does seem very difficult to make any rational sense of material choice anymore. The steel frame is supposed recyclable or possibly reclaimable. It is unclear whether the milled aluminium roof decking on both phases were from mills powered by hydro or renewables sourced electricity. The timber cladding to the café kitchen is reclaimed from a Somerset factory shelving Stilton cheeses – again appropriate in more ways than one.  The carbon credentials of Linoleum has now, thanks to White Design’s phase 1 insistence, become the floor material of choice in UWE.

Stride Treglown has clearly a general preference for the smooth and planar in contrast to the legible articulation of White Design, but it only gets its way externally. Inside it is still very much a teaching tool of exposed construction and servicing. The ‘ModCell’ straw bales get a brief exposure behind glass to a corner of the café, but otherwise no-one would know that this low-tech, low-carbon footprint, high-insulating and acoustic performing walling, is in their midst. The interior still feels like any other good robust educational space, although the most critical aesthetic elements were still to be installed on my visit – namely the furniture. This is where usability will be really tested. Here, I am led to understand, the product designer’s influence has already paid off. Roll on the further loosening of the boundaries between design disciplines.

Broad church
While visiting with UWE’s faculty of environment and technology’s professor of architecture, Richard Parnaby, who with a great team has developed something quite unique in environmental education on this campus, a phone call came. As we stood in this same but different environment of phase 2, it was confirmed that after years of negotiation the formal benchmarks for architectural education had finally been agreed by Arb and the RIBA. This seemed curiously prescient given that Parnaby has done more than most to encourage creative overlaps between the environmental disciplines. It’s much like the building, a broad church with much shared language but room for detailed differentiation of final outcome.

In Dean Hawkes’ earlier appraisal of phase 1, he ended by noting: ‘The very best of environmental traditions transcend the literal by raising the necessary to the level of symbol. This is a difficult trick that perhaps only comes with experience.’  There is little doubt that with the new building’s added social facilities, its meshing into the crossroads between residential and the teaching environment, and the welcome of its new product designer inhabitants, that phase 1 and 2 together will be a vibrant and enjoyable place to learn, but Hawkes, I suggest, is still waiting for the raising.

Patrick Hannay is programme director of interior architecture BA (Hons) at the Cardiff school of Art and Design, UWIC. He is also editor of Touchstone, the magazine for Architecture in Wales