School of Slavonic Studies
Client: UCL Estates
Architect: Short and Associates
Brickwork: DB Ryder & Co
Structural engineer: Martin Stockley Associates
M&E: Environmental Design Partnership
Bricks: HG Matthews Grey-Brown Machine Made
A striking newcomer to Georgian Bloomsbury is breaking new ground in sustainable design.
Short and Associates’ UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in Bloomsbury is the world’s first application of passive downdraft cooling on a public building in a major city.
Forecast to use less than half the energy of a typical mechanically cooled building, SSEES also uses less energy than a well designed naturally ventilated cellular building. Within this sustainable framework, the thermal mass of brickwork plays an important role.
Completed this year at a cost of £10m, SSEES has a total floor area of 3,437m2 over seven-storeys, including a research library and a unique book collection. A glass atrium rising through the building forms part of the cooling system along with perimeter stacks, roof mounted chimneys, an ingenious architrave for exhausting air from the stair zone and a magnificent brick elevation.
An independently supported 530mm-wide structural brick wall is connected to the seven-storey reinforced concrete frame by a series of brick buttresses through which the staircases run. These buttresses are tied to the concrete by cast-in dovetailed channels, allowing vertical movement of brickwork and concrete. An exposed glulam timber frame built off the fifth-floor slab forms the roof structure, with an ETFE pillow roof over the central atrium.
The massive cavity brickwork of the facade consists of an outer 215mm thick solid brick wall, tied across a 100mm cavity to an inner 215mm solid brick wall that is fair-faced to capitalise on the thermal mass of the construction. At 32m long, the brickwork of the main facade is low absorption, machine-made bricks laid in a relatively soft (1:2:9) lime mortar designed to cope with changes in temperature and moisture without the need for movement joints.
Two 1.4m-wide staircases arranged symmetrically either side of the main entrance are each expressed on the elevation by a melodic, sinusoidal sweep of windows. Goethe’s ‘frozen music’ analogy immediately springs to mind. But the stair zone also acts as a huge ventilated cavity that tempers the building’s internal temperatures.
If there is one criticism, it is that the high expectations fostered by the dramatic elevation are dashed slightly by the rather sterile reception area and the heavy-looking fenestration of the atrium. These, however, are minor considerations given the building’s impressive environmental aspirations.
Professor Alan Short, principal of Short and Associates, likens the building to a small urban palace. ‘We looked at Gaudi but also at late Romanesque and medieval European churches. Being Bloomsbury, we could have designed in a Georgian idiom but instead have created a kind of palazzo that expresses the dynamism of SSEES.’
Intensifying this grandeur are outsized, asymmetric soldier arches – some three courses deep – that oversail reveals by up to 600mm and recall monumental Roman brick architecture. Clear references to both Gaudi and Moorish Spain can be seen in the wonderful stair hall.
Whatever you read into the design, one thing is certain. The SSEES building is an energetic piece of architecture that manages to inject a new dynamism into this corner of the capital.