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. 

Should office workers stand rather than sit?

"Sitting is the the smoking of our generation", according to an article in the Harvard Business Review. Not only is it bad for your health, but it decreases productivity: "I suspect advances in office furniture are the main reason productivity stubbornly fails to improve. With everyone sitting so comfortably, there is never any great rush to get things done", writes Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times. But reducing the amount of time office workers sits is a huge challenge: It means rethinking architecture, disrupting traditional work patterns, and may involve considerable costs. Sit-stand desks are an obvious solution, but they are not cheap, and many employers treat investments in better workplaces as a cost rather than an investment.

AMA director Alexi Marmot, a specialist on workplace design and a UCL Bartlett Professor, was interviewed about this by the BBC. She commented "if what we are creating are environments where people are not going to be terribly healthy and suffering from diseases like cardiovascular disease and diabetes, it is highly unlikely the organisation benefits."

Read the entire BBC article here,  or listen to the interview here or live on BBC Radio 4 next Monday, 21 April, at 21:00.

Sitting as the norm in workplaces is a recent innovation.
Copyright © Wikimedia Commons

"Office buildings tend to be very boring" - Richard Rogers

The Economist has reported that offices in the UK are getting ever-smaller (per worker, that is), meaning that many large city firms are consolidating their operations in fewer and fewer buildings. The professional services firm KPMG, for example, has reduced the number of the offices buildings it used in London from seven to two. This is a challenge for architects and designers. How are they responding to it? Not very well, according to Richard Rogers, who opines that "office buildings tend to be very boring" in this video about the Leadenhall building, the Rogers-designed new office building in the City.

The Leadenhall building © Creative Commons licence 

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

Prince Edward visits AMA project

Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, visited Robert Browning Primary School in Walworth on the occasion of his 50th birthday. The school has recently been refurbished and extended with AMA's help.

AMA’s involvement in this project was all-encompassing. Our aim was to make the most of the existing spaces on a compact, urban site and create new, flexible opportunities for learning, which involved the wholesale reconfiguration of the existing Victorian school building, construction of a new entrance, new nursery building and outdoor play areas. 

Through a series of major structural interventions, we sensitively altered the physical restrictions of the existing Victorian building, and provided a prominent new entrance that welcomes visitors, improves security and bolsters the school's identity in its community. The alterations transformed circulation areas into useful learning spaces while clustering the ground floor classrooms and toilet facilities to improve the building’s organisation and legibility.

Read more on the project here, and see pictures of the Earl's visit here.

Robert Browning School after the refurbishment
Picture © AMA 2013