How we did it ... Campus blocks conform to design grid reference

Ben Willis, Planning, 25 July 2008

Background: The original campus was designed by the modernist architect Sir Denys Lasdun, so the buildings had to meet the demands of modern student life within an architecturally sensitive context.

Who is behind it? UEA's estates department, LSI Architects, Cambridge Landscape Architects, quantity surveyor Davis Langdon and contractor John Youngs.

Project aims: To improve UEA's accommodation offer through state-of-the-art residential facilities.

Skills involved: Architecture, masterplanning, conservation, structural engineering, landscape design.

Architect: Sir Denys Lasdun's modernist Inca-style ziggurat buildings are an iconic feature of the University of East Anglia (UEA) campus. So when it came to producing a masterplan and designs for two new residential blocks for the eastern quarter, there was an obvious starting point.

"Lasdun's masterplan had a strong consistency of urban design, which encompassed not just the buildings but the way they relate to external space and landscape in general," says LSI Architects project architect David Thompson. "A challenge at the outset was to identify a way of adding to Lasdun's original in a way that could be defended to planners and with which the university would feel comfortable."

LSI's masterplan set out to reflect the strong geometry deployed by Lasdun. "We referred constantly to the so-called Lasdun grid - a criss-crossing of angles that generates the strong diagonal emphasis you see in the ziggurats," Thompson says.

Lasdun's geometry was picked up particularly strongly in the landscaping, a prominent feature of the original blueprint. "Reference to nautical terms such as harbours suggested that the landscape was seen as a body of water flowing into and around the buildings," Thompson says. "Our masterplan responded to that by proposing a flowing, interconnected set of non-symmetrical spaces."

The buildings themselves, Thompson says, are designed to reflect Lasdun's use of pop-ups - blocks situated on the rooftops containing plant such as lift gear. In the new buildings, however, these elements are softened through the use of curved forms and timber cladding.

In the 400 and 900-bedroom residential blocks, the second of which has just been completed, further design challenges were posed by building regulation updates to reflect new laws requiring universal access for disabled people.

The university wanted to retain the campus's traditional model of dividing student accommodation into ten-person houses over three storeys, but in the end the overriding objective of universal access meant that the blocks had to be planned horizontally rather than vertically.

"We took the university's model and made two horizontal 12-person houses between stair and lift cores," says Thompson. "This provided universal lift access, so anyone in a wheelchair could not only have an accessible room but could go and visit students in any other room - very sociable and equitable."

A number of environmental features were also incorporated, including an extension to the combined heat and power unit that already serves UEA buildings. But because all the 1,300 new rooms are en suite, a recovery system had to be included to recycle heat lost through the mechanical ventilation of the bathrooms. "The imperative was to reduce the amount of heat simply thrown away," Thompson explains.

A further objective was to make the buildings as robust as possible to stand up to student wear and tear. This was achieved by using tunnel form construction, whereby concrete is poured into a series of pre-made moulds. As well as producing a very strong structure, this method had the added advantage of being very rapid and enabled the contractors to complete the work several months ahead of schedule.