School of Engineering

A significant design constraint was the spatial and servicing requirements of over 20 different labs and workshops. Our response was to stack the accommodation based on practical requirements: heavy workshops and ‘maker’ space on the ground floor; specialist laboratories on the first floor; and lighter labs and offices on the top floor.

Within a constrained site this created an uneven distribution of spaces across floors. Our solution was to flip the massing inside out and organise spaces around a central atrium with a void that gets bigger as you move upwards.

This strategy made the building envelope thermally and cost efficient while creating a central Social Learning space that met the faculties vision.

The diagram almost completely removes traditional corridors making the building feel safe and inclusive, particularly to lone students working at night. Services follow a ‘ring main’ around the atrium edge feeding off to perimeter rooms, all intended to provide maximum building lifespan.

The project was delivered on a live site and to an ambitious timescale, opening to students exactly 3 years after design work commenced, with the final 8 months during the peak of the first wave of Covid-19. While occupancy was limited during the first year, the spaciousness and natural ventilation strategy has enabled staff and students to make use of the building throughout the pandemic.

Our interior design team worked extensively with Southerns Broadstock, who were UWE’s preferred furniture supplier, to create a Furniture, Fixtures and Equipment (FF&E) package that would support their aspirations to encourage social and collaborative working.

As the building houses specialist technical subjects, much of the university’s workshop equipment needed to be brought over from the old building and accommodated within this building. This required us to conduct a legacy equipment review, as well as hold workshops with the university estate team and lecturers, to ensure that the layouts of equipment were correct for use.

With this type of equipment, there are also other things to consider, such as safe working areas and emergency stops.

We included a lot of extra details within the FF&E package so that the furniture provided was suitable for their exact purposes. Some lab benches had worktops which would withstand the extreme heat generated by some equipment, others were especially suitable for use with chemicals.

We used BIM extensively to model the equipment and display its exact location within each room. This required a significant amount of coordination with the equipment team and other design teams such as audio visual and mechanical and electrical teams. Each colour of the drawing shows each different equipment or furniture zone.