It’s 12 awards and counting for uni centre for computing
LAB ASPECT OF URBAN SCIENCES BUILDING IS RECOGNISED
A CITY centre building which can’t stop winning awards has picked up its 12th accolade.
Newcastle University’s £58m Urban Sciences Building scooped the Campus of the Future title in the Green Gown Awards. The award was for the USB’s buildingas-a-lab concept.
Built as a new home for the University’s School of Computing at the Science Central site, now known as the Newcastle Helix , the USB includes lecture theatres, computer clusters, a cafe and work spaces for staff and students.
It is also home to the National Green Infrastructure Facility, the National Centre for Energy Systems Integration, the Siemens MindSphere Laboratory and the Urban Observatory.
Last month the USB was voted overall winner in the Royal Town Planning Institute’s (RTPI) regional awards and also won an Education Estates Award. The building was entered for the RTPI awards by the university and Newcastle City Council.
The chairman of RTPI North East, Ian Cansfield, said: “Partnership working was key to the Urban Science Building project, demonstrating best practice in planning. Led by Newcastle Council’s planning officer, a multi-disciplinary team provided joined up responses to urban and landscape design, flood mitigation, and transport to ensure quality design and place-making.”
“With no other building like it in the country, the Urban Science Building is also at the heart of the digital revolution. The integrated labs are at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary research in urban design and technologies.” It also won the Lord Mayor’s Design Award for Sustainability in Newcastle and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors North East Award for Design through Innovation, when it was described as a “truly inspirational.”
The extent to which sustainability was incorporated into the USB was the key to the Green Gown Awards success.
Dedicated to innovative and interdisciplinary sustainability research for a lower-carbon age, the building features a heating system fed by heat pumps, grid-integrated energy storage and photovoltaic (PV) and PV-thermal arrays (which help convert solar power into electrical and thermal energy).
Phil James, director of the Urban Observatory, whose sensors gather data across the city, said: “We measure everything that comes into the building and everything that goes out. Millions of data points are collected every day, giving us information about all of the systems in the building: power, water usage, drainage, people movement and more.
“This allows us to fully understand how the building operates and how it interacts with the outside world. We also make all of this data freely available through the Urban Observatory so that others can learn, compare and develop upon the insight available from the USB.” Prof Julie Sanders, deputy vice-chancellor at Newcastle University, said: “The USB has been instrumental in developing our approach to sustainable construction.
“Winning the Campus of the Future award is wonderful but it also gives us the appetite and encouragement to keep going, and to achieve even more in the years ahead.”
Matt Dunlop, university head of sustainability, said: “We knew that off-the-shelf sustainability evaluations would only take us so far towards our ambitions.
“We developed a whole-life cycle, bespoke, sustainability framework for the building. The framework we developed is now being used on other projects at the university, helping us to widen the impact of the USB and develop a campus of the future.”
Prof John Fitzgerald, head of the school of computing and part of the design and delivery team for the USB, said: “From the outset of this project, we were determined to work across boundaries to deliver a building that worked for everybody.
“All of us – academics, researchers, students, building users, administrators and cleaning staff – worked with the architects, contractors and handover teams to bring our vision for the USB to reality.”
The project architects were Hawkins\Brown and the contractor was Bowmer & Kirkland.
The USB’s neighbour on the Newcastle Helix site is the National Innovation Centre for Data. Due to open in 2020, the centre will connect businesses, researchers and markets to help the UK to thrive in the global data-driven economy.
The Green Gown Awards ceremony was staged in York by the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges.