Blog Article
To help promote ideas about workplace and sustainable office design, Business Services visited the new Arup office in Birmingham.
Arup have just celebrated the first anniversary of the opening of their new office at One Centenary Way, Paradise just off Chamberlain Square in central Birmingham. As part of BCU's Green Impact work staff recently had a tour of the office co-ordinated by Alison Kilby and Mike Strangeways, Arup Workplace Lead and Sustainable Lead respectively for the project. The Arup office is a showcase of what can be achieved by incorporating the latest ideas on workplace and sustainability into building design, but it also illustrates the limitations of this approach when you do not own the building.
The Arup office is designed to accommodate all its 800 staff but not at once, the current requirement being for staff to be in the office two days a week. There is deliberately no car parking spaces (apart from one disabled bay), instead people are encouraged to take public transport or cycle, changing facilities including showers being shared with another tenant, Goldman Sachs. Other design features include a café for staff, bike storage facilities and electronic lockers. However, there are only enough lockers for half the number of staff. Rather than asking if everyone wanted one, Arup instead calculated that this was more than sufficient to meet demand.
Design limitations
Despite many state-of-the-art features, the office design was limited by the fact that Arup are a tenant, the building being owned by Metropolitan Estates and Property Corporation, a real estate development and asset management company owned by Federated Hermes. The building was designed by Sir Robert McAlpine and is constructed on top of the strategic Queensway Tunnel under the busy A38 road. Due to Arup not having access to the roof or the outside of the building, renewables like solar PV panels were not incorporated into the design, but the large glass windows on each floor result in good passive solar gain. As Arup did not have control over the external building, they instead made it a condition of their tenancy that the office space acted as a showcase for their company within the constraints of the Paradise development.
The all-electric building uses air source pumps for heating which were installed to replace the old gas fired boilers while the whole office is smart enabled. Spread over 3 floors, the 69,000 square feet of office space was designed to be as accessible, sustainable and energy efficient as possible, and constructed to achieve WELL Building Platinum Certification (the WELL Building Standard is recognised as the industry leader in measuring how much a building enhances the wellbeing and health of the people using it).
A green and smart office
One of the most striking aspects of the design is the huge moss wall incorporating the Arup logo. Like the other green plants which hang from the walls and are in communal spaces throughout the building, the moss wall is alive, plastic plants being banned. Other design points include the use of sustainable cork for the flooring and the absence of a ceiling to save on cost and carbon. Digital touch screens situated on all floors provide not just Arup messages but also transport information like train times.
The smart office incorporates comprehensive data recording of how much floor, space and room is used. Each room has its own separate control panel enabling the audio-visual screens (two in each, one for people on the call, the other to show content), heating and lighting to be set individually. Remote sensors record how many people use each room, enabling Arup to only clean those rooms that need it and to only occupy the number of floors that are needed, on some days one floor being closed.
Carbon and cost savings
As a result of these design features, Arup have seen embodied carbon savings of between 30-40% over a standard office design, the single biggest contributor to that figure being the lack of a ceiling. While some of the design features initially cost more like the cork flooring, Arup has benefited from significant savings in operating costs since the office was opened.
Commenting on the visit, BCU Pro Vice Chancellor for Sustainability, Ian Blair, said: ‘It is fascinating to see what can be achieved with a little thought and appropriate pre-planning - to produce a fantastic working environment that can still support and care for the environment. Having this insight into green building fit out is timely as we approach the University Estate Master planning process and such exemplars of good practice show us what the future may look like for BCU’.
BCU and Arup
BCU has an ongoing partnership with Arup and worked together last year to install the Sound Lab, one of 3 Digital Labs in our innovation centre STEAMhouse. The Sound Lab offers the potential for staff, students and local businesses to engage in accelerated digital research and development. It was the first to be located in the West Midlands and the first to be installed in a university campus. As part of the partnership, BCU is continuing to work with Arup on projects that add value to both organisations.