Comment Humble brick in modern light
south side, facing the campus’s playing fields. This relationship neatly expresses the building’s dual identity; both a university facility, and a public resource available to be used by visitors.
The outside of a building should as far as is possible express what is happening inside, and that was part of the brief for this one.
But one of the problems in designing an indoor sports centre is that most of its spaces are windowless, and therefore difficult to express externally. There are some exceptions here, the 50-metre swimming pool being the main one.
The pool is located behind the white concrete colonnade, and its big windows make it transparent to Bristol Road. The colonnade shades the pool from too much direct sunlight, and passers-by can look into the pool. Similarly, someone walking up Edgbaston Park Road can see into two of the activity rooms, with full-height glazing admitting daylight.
But other spaces, such as the squash courts and the two big sports halls, have to exclude daylight, in order to eliminate glare. Having precisely-controllable artificial lighting for TV filming is another criterion.
The architects have cleverly compensated for these limitations by exploiting opportunities for what we might call intervisibility – opening up views between interior spaces.
The building’s location on a hillside, arranged on several levels, assists this. So from the coffee bar next to the reception you have a view down into the pool. From the upper level gymnasium you can look obliquely down into one of the sports halls.
These experiences all help the legibility of the building, sharing information about what is going on inside it. The most dramatic example is perhaps the location of the indoor climbing wall inside the tall reception space. It wasn’t in use when I was there, but I imagine that it can be an entertaining spectacle, to see people climbing high above our heads.
Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands is a distinguished firm of architects, with a lot of excellent work done both in the UK and abroad. They are one of those firms whose work is not necessarily recognisable – there is no recurring house style. The character and the appearance of a building is determined by its location, its purpose and its context. I tend to think that this is a characteristic of integrity.
The Sport and Fitness building is their first sports centre, and the university made a good and brave appointment. With specialised building types such as hospitals or sports centres, there is often a conservative attitude that “unless you’ve already designed one, you can’t design one”, which can obstruct innovation.
It is their second and biggest building in Birmingham, the Teenage Cancer Trust building – the elevated metal pod that you see at the bottom of Steelhouse Lane – being the earlier one.
There is an additional satisfaction in that the director in charge of the design, Paul Sandilands, is a Birmingham man, and a graduate of Birmingham School of Architecture.
He is pleased at having been able to contribute a building of significance to his home city, and I think the city in turn will value what his firm, and the university, have given it. Joe Holyoak is a Birminghambased architect and urban designer