Bath Spa University 'Commons' Opening

AMA would like to congratulate Bath Spa University on the opening of its new ‘Commons’ teaching building on Thursday 4 June. The event exhibited art installations, dance, theatre and music performances by students and alumni. The building was formally opened by film producer Lord David Puttnam who, in his speech, paid tribute to the strength of the British design industry and credited the new building with enabling the new generations of British designers to maintain our position in the world.

AMA worked closely with the University to develop interior spaces of the ‘Commons’ that would generate enthusiasm for both students and staff. Social learning spaces on the ground floor which incorporate open and quiet positions, have already proved to be extremely popular. Read more about the ceremony and the Newton Park Campus development by clicking the links.

Alexi Marmot writes about the influence of architecture on the student experience

An important new book on The Physical University: Contours of space and place in higher education that has just been published by Routledge, edited by Paul Temple. AMA director Alexi Marmot, professor at UCL's Bartlett, has written a key chapter on how the student experience and university effectiveness are influenced by design, architecture and FM.

Details about the book are available here.

Bath Spa University ‘Commons’ is first class

Bath Spa University, BSU, has just opened its highly anticipated new ‘Commons’ building at its Newton Park Campus, Bath. This exciting and innovative new teaching facility, the main hub on campus, will transform the student learning experience and enhance the way staff work, with its professionally conceived design, operations and furnishings.

AMA Alexi Marmot Associates was awarded the interior fit-out for the new build, drawing on our strength and wide experience in higher education projects. We took just 15 months from start to finish, including wide consultation, design, specification, tendering and fit-out.

The building is Bath Spa University’s largest, with 80,000 square feet over three floors, providing additional teaching and meeting spaces, staff work bases and major specialist digital studio facilities.  An outdoor amphitheatre and landscaped areas complete the special landscaped setting.

The Commons offers highly innovative, naturally ventilated spaces with technologically and integrated design elements and furniture.  Lecture and training rooms enjoy a range of furniture set-ups to encourage individual and group work.  The largely open plan ground floor supports the library and student services with bookable, open and quiet work areas, a lively café and flexible spaces for hosting large events. A central media wall - one of the largest in the UK - provides a dramatic information platform for the University within the dramatic atrium.

Professor Christina Slade, Vice-Chancellor of Bath Spa University, reports that colleagues ‘are thrilled with how it looks. We are delighted with the furnishings. Someone said it looked like a first class airline lounge.’ The official VIP opening will be in June.

BSU Commons Building (Photos: AMA)

Workplace Strategy Summit 2014

On June 8-10 of this year, University College London will host a gathering of leading thinkers in workplace strategy, including AMA director Alexi Marmot, professor at UCL.

Building on the success of the first Workplace Strategy Summit held at Cornell University, the 2014 summit will feature leading academics and experts in the fields of facility management and real estate speaking about the most innovative concepts to emerge in workplace strategy. 

Among the topics being debated are the following ones:

• Alexi Marmot: Healthy Building Syndrome
• Chris Kane/Caroline Waters: Transforming BBC’s Workplace
• Melissa Marsh and others: Cafes, CoWorking, and the New Economy
• Frank Becker: Workplace Innovation on the Edge
• Wim Pullen: Generational Workplace Preferences
• Also, a number of experts will talk about workplace trends and global workplace research

Read more about the conference at www.workplacestrategysummit.org, and see the complete program schedule here. 

University of Loughborough’s Pilkington Library re-opens after Refurbishment

The Pilkington Library at Loughborough University has emerged smiling from a fast track building programme. It now has 1375 library seats, greatly improved facilities including a new reception and information desks as well as fully reconditioned WCs throughout. All this was accomplished in a three month building period during which the library was closed, but provided a comprehensive service in an alternative location. The secret of success in the process lies in several things:

1. The comprehensive user briefing process that was able to take place at the start. AMA provided concept sketches and important design ideas. These were iteratively developed with the library staff  particularly to bring light and increased connectivity into the formerly gloomy building; 
2. the decision to close the library so that the extensive work could be carried out enabling additional aspects of improvement to be added to the programme as they would not cause additional disruption;  
3. the watchful eye, determined support and continuous communication with stakeholders provided by the Library staff, especially Brant Hickman, the Library Facilities Manager, who is more of a Chief Operating Officer rather than a FM. 

The briefing process, into which the Library staff had full input, was longer than the build process.  The project success supports the fact - widely acknowledged, though not always acted on - that good preparation pays off. Though the successful contractor offered a rather different layout initially, the Library used the AMA plans as their ‘base line’ and brought the project back in most respects to what they had agreed they wanted

Closing the entire library – the main one on campus - for three months was a bold action. This is never popular with students. However the alternative service provided was so excellent that there was not a single complaint throughout. This helped the project greatly by opening the way for much wider improvements than originally envisaged. These had originally focussed only on bringing the 4th floor into use for learning seats.  Instead, all 4 floors of the library have received an uplift, and all within the original time scale. This will avoid the need for future disruption to complete small but important additional projects throughout.

Brant and his colleagues had to return regularly to the building during the build process, to collect and return books from the storage zones, as part of the service to the students. This allowed them to engage with what was happening, to suggest improvements, prevent mistakes arising from misreading drawings and maintain good contact with the process so that they could keep stakeholders informed.

A more detailed article will follow. Meanwhile pictures can be accessed on the library's Flickr site here, and more about the project is available here.

Library interior, after the refurbishment
© University of Loughborough Library  

Library interior, after the refurbishment (same location as below)
© University of Loughborough Library 

Library interior, before the refurbishment
© University of Loughborough Library 

Library interior, before the refurbishment
© University of Loughborough Library

YES to physical universities in an age of MOOCs, distance and online learning

Do we still need physical universities in an age of distance learning and online courses? A unanimous yes is the answer according to the authors of a new book, The Physical University, published this month, edited by Paul Temple from the Institute of Education. They make the case that place-based universities are still essential even while virtual universities expand and flourish across the globe. Demand for all forms of learning is growing internationally as the world population expands and as higher education participation rates rise, even in the poorest countries. So there is still a vast and expanding need for face-to-face, virtual, and blended learning offerings. Place-based research environments where new knowledge develops are also increasing. It is there that the new ideas taught by future teachers are generated.

Alexi Marmot's illuminating chapter "Managing the Campus" demonstrates how the student experience and university effectiveness are influenced by the design and management of the estate. This is essential reading for all those interested in university space, pedagogy, teaching and learning, estate management and design.

Details about the book are available here.

University of Oxford, Trinity College
© Creative Commons licence

 Illinois Institute of Technology, Crown Hall, by Mies van der Rohe
© Creative Commons licence

Adsetts Learning Centre reviewed positively by students

Sheffield Hallam University’s recently refrubished Adsetts Learning Centre, which was redesigned by AMA, has been received very positively by students. In the 2013 National Student Survey, 89% of SHU’s students praised the library and its resources. One student commented that 'it's just great in the learning centre. It's a place you really want to study in - as soon as you walk in you're in the mindset to work, in a really comfortable environment', while another thought that ‘the facilities are really good, particularly the learning centre. I find it really easy to concentrate there’.

AMA worked closely with the SHU learning centre team to rethink how their award winning library building could be transformed to meet the needs of today’s students, address the rapidly changing work and teaching patterns in the future, and provide a bright and welcoming environment. Effective and rational panning allowed the retention of the same number of books and the number of study places was increased by 10% and each of these also had a larger footprint. The building is open 24/7, and was fully occupied during the refurbishment, which was carried out in the quietest time in 3 phases over 3 summers to minimise disruption.

Adsetts Learning Centre. Photo © AMA 2012

The Future of Massive Open Online Courses

The burgeoning MOOC - Massive Open Online Courses - community of Europe met this week in the Rolex Learning Centre in Switzerland’s EPFL, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. This stunning and original building by global star-chitects SANAA, one of the most expensive university libraries in the world, is a symbol of belief in the power of place for the student experience in traditional universities, an ironic though attractive, location in which to debate the disruptive educational model of MOOCs at the eMOOC's 2014 European MOOCs Stakeholders Summit.

Over 400 attendees from universities and developers of the main MOOC platforms – Cousera, EdX, Miriada X, Canvas networks, Open2study, Futurelearn, France Université Numérique, iversity, among others – heard illuminating presentations on the benefits and pitfalls of MOOCs. The statistics are clear –  many people register for a MOOC, few become learners (i.e. watch at least one session), and even fewer complete the course and receive a certificate – typically around 5% of the registered learners. Most learners already have a university education, many at Masters level or above.

Two takeaway lessons for this learner. First, the possibility of MOOCs has forced traditional universities and colleges to focus on their existing students and the best form of pedagogy to ensure that both face-to-face and online learning are as good as they can be. Second, and most inspiring, is that MOOCs may in fact deliver a huge increase in global education excellence, improving dramatically equity of educational opportunity, especially for people of the ‘global south’.

Conference Twitter feed: #eMOOCs2014

Rolex Learning Centre © Wikimedia Commons license

Rolex Learning Centre © Alexi Marmot

What are MOOCs? © Creative Commons license

The Changing Nature of Academic Workspace

200,000 academic staff in UK universities typically work in office space that differs significantly from the rest of the country’s offices. Most academics work, surrounded by books and papers, in their own enclosed individual offices or in small group offices.  By contrast, the majority of office-based employees in the rest of the economy work in open offices shared with many other people, and very few books or files. Is this difference essentially due to the special nature of academic work? Do academics really need individual offices, or should they use shared offices like most other office workers?

This was hotly debated at a recent seminar hosted by AMA Alexi Marmot Associates attended by around 30 academics and estates professionals from sixteen UK universities, where issues of status, academics wish to personalise their workspace and to store many books and papers, the importance of a sense of belonging, the influence of changing student requirements, the role of interdisciplinary, and the importance of consultation when changing academic workspace were discussed, among several other topics. 

A report which summarises the discussion is now available here. 

‘Reimagining Academic Workspace’ Debate (2)

AMA hosted a well attended debate titled ‘Reimagining Academic Workspace’ last night. Around thirty academic and estates professionals debated the topic of academic workspace and the possible fate of individual offices in academia.

The discussion revolved around the issue of whether academic offices were likely to take the lead from the private sector, with shared workspace and hot-desking. Several issues were covered: student requirements for a ‘better club’ and 24/7 access, provision of social spaces, workspaces that foster interdisciplinarity, the irregular use of university buildings, academics’ desire to personalise their workspaces and their need for storage, the role of status, and the need for quiet workspaces.

As one discussant put it: “The search for the Holy Grail continues.”

A report on the debate will be posted here soon.

‘Reimagining Academic Workspace’ Debate

On 16 October from 6pm, AMA will be hosting a debate titled ‘Reimagining Academic Workspace’ at the Royal College of General Practitioners. We will be discussing whether academics still need individual offices, or whether academic offices are likely to go the way of corporate workspace, towards shared offices and even hot-desking.

Does academic workspace need to be truly different? What new solutions are emerging? AMA will be delivering three brief presentations each championing a different perspective on the issues in order to start the discussion.

One view, still generally held by many academics, is that their needs are different from other office users. Others, though, think that academic offices are perhaps no different from other offices, so that academic workspace could be more open, collaborative and shared. How can the estates teams and academics best seek the solution suited to the circumstance?  

Transforming Loughborough University Library

AMA developed the design brief for 'Transforming the Library,' Loughborough University's major refurbishment of Pilkington Library.  Our role involved precedent site visits, consultations and concept design options. We developed the selected concept into a scheme design, and supported the university when selecting the contractors to deliver the project. Some of our concept images are below.

Click here for more information about the project.

Transforming Loughborough University Library
Copyright © AMA 2013

Two Sheffield Hallam University learning centres complete

AMA's refurbishment of two of Sheffield Hallam University's learning centres is featured in 'University Business' magazine.  The phased project involved the creation of 100 additional learning spaces including new furniture, IT, lighting, heating, small group and presentation spaces. AMA Director David Jenkin said: 'Using evidence from occupation surveys and involving both students and staff in the process allowed AMA to transform the building into a totally student-focussed facility, providing a whole range of different places for study.'

For more information click here.

Sheffield Hallam University learning centres
Copyright © AMA 2013

UCL Stratford proposals approved

On 25 October, Newham Council approved UCL's proposal to develop a Stratford campus adjacent to the Olympic Park.  This campus will 'bring science, technology, education and research to the heart of Stratford'.  AMA worked with UCL to develop a strategic brief of academic stakeholders.  For more information, click here.

Examining the link between learning outcomes and building design.

AMA's report to the Scottish Funding Council 'Matching post-16 investment to education outcomes' has been published.  This report summarises key findings within the body of research linking buildings and estates to educational outcomes, drawn from studies covering schools, colleges and universities. The report also recommends a set of key questions that Colleges and Universities should ask when developing their estate investment and maintenance plans.

To read the full report, click here.