Warwick University New Car Design Automotive Building

The NAIC, which completed this year, is the largest research centre of its kind in Europe. Based at the University of Warwick, the NAIC is a partnership between the university's engineering, management, manufacturing and technology department, known as Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), Jaguar Land Rover, and Tata Motors UK, part-funded by a UK government Higher Education Funding Council for England grant. The brief was to create a collaborative environment for research groups working on automotive design that would halve the time taken from idea to production.

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FW: Can you outline the background to the project?
RL: It can be seen as a coming-together of a large part of what remains of the British car industry with academia. It brings together Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Tata Motors European Technical Centre (TMETC) with the University of Warwick's research arm, WMG. Car-making is known as the industry of a thousand trades, so it also represents the coming-together of lots of supporting companies. It reflects the importance of research for a company like JLR, which depends on continuous innovation to keep its cars fresh against mighty German competitors like BMW or Mercedes.

Car-making is known as the industry of a thousand trades – so it also represents the coming together of lots of supporting companies

Can you describe the building's siting?
A crucial move was to site it at the heart of the Warwick campus, rather than out in a science park. It's part of a group of buildings around a landscaped Academic Square at one end of an axis that connects to the hub of the university. The challenge has been to make a campus building that is open to its surroundings, while accommodating functions that are commercially sensitive and need to be kept quite private.

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What were the key requirements of the brief?
It was a pretty unique brief: a co-location of industry, research and academia into the heart of a university campus. There were four key ambitions, which came out of early discussions, as to what the building had to achieve: to foster innovation and collaboration across disciplines; to connect academic and manufacturing research; to inspire a new generation of engineers; and also to showcase forward-thinking in British engineering and design.

What were the main challenges and constraints?
Its complexity, for one. With a lot of different groups and stakeholders involved, both within the university and also within Jaguar LandRover, which is a huge company with 30,000 employees, several divisions and a large research arm.

As a large, immensely complex assembly of spaces, the challenge was to design a building that was immediately legible, and had a simplicity and strength of purpose to its design – a 'big picture' – while getting all the adjacencies of function right. We worked from the inside-out.

The challenge was to design a building that was immediately legible, has a simplicity, and strength of purpose to its design

What was the overall concept of the design?
From early sketches there was the idea of big roof. This also acts on an urban scale, creating an entrance porch from which the two approaches from the campus converge under the porch – it's articulated to catch you.

Take us through the layout.
Visitors enter beneath a porch at a key crossing point of routes across campus. Inside, the glass-fronted engineering hall lies directly ahead, announcing the purpose of NAIC: you immediately get an idea of the function of the building. Beyond reception, there are layered daylit meeting and movement ledges and balconies above large blacked-out virtual reality studios. A terraced hillside of activities is created, beneath the unifying umbrella of one of the largest timber roofs in the world, a symbol of collaboration and the industry shift towards green mobility.

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You can rise from terrace to terrace towards the showroom and 'design garden' on the top floor, which front the more private world of the design studios. Inside, in the engineering hall, the sets of balconies rising to the showroom at the top both underline the openness of the spaces but create a theatrical route up: a promenade through a hillside town is how I describe it. You can see all the activities going on. It's a four-storey building, but almost everybody chooses to use these stairs.

We held consultations with all the research teams to come up with a workplace design that offered a huge variety of work settings, from individual booths to large spaces for the weekly assembly of specialist teams, all gathered around the collaborative hub. Office spaces include workshops in desk areas to better connect thinking and making. Walls are flexible and surfaces are reconfigurable, writable, projection-friendly.

Spaces and work settings range from acoustic mobile phone booths to spaces capable of events, such as car launches and other functions. The building structure is exposed wherever possible and we have chosen carefully where to integrate supporting services to maintain a de-cluttered, calming internal environment.

How did you marry this idea of openness and collaboration with the sensitive commercial work going on?
Yes, the car industry has real issues around security and intellectual property, which has often been typified by a fortress mentality – erecting barriers to defend industrial secrets. An added concern was the co-location of different companies within the centre. This all seemed to conflict with the vision for the building to showcase the innovation taking place inside. But our default approach was towards 'openness', rather than privacy, in order to encourage communication and collaboration through visual and physical connection. As we developed the design we explored with the client whether the issue with each area requiring privacy was one of visual or acoustic privacy, and from what distance.

Take, for example, our positioning of the main engineering hall right inside the front door. A large glass window puts the hall on display to all, celebrating the main purpose of the building. But within this space we worked out that screening individual bays off with curtains was sufficient for the level of privacy required when needed.

We also located the reception within the main collaborative hub, so that there is full public access to the area of the ground floor it shares with an exhibition space, informal meeting areas, engineering hall, student projects space and café. All visitors are thus taken into the heart of NAIC – and can experience the 'theatre' of the central hub and some key work areas – without compromising the activities taking place beyond the barriers and on upper floors.

Could you describe the structure?
The building belies its cost and is actually quite simple in terms of its fabric. External walls were assembled using a pioneering system of prefabricated, self-spanning timber and CLT 'megapanels'. The CLT panels we chose are slim, 90mm-thick, 12m sheets, which are very economical when used on a big scale, offered performance better than steel, needed no extra secondary steelwork and could be erected quickly.

Between the ground floor and roof, a rippling façade of curving expanded mesh acts as a sunshield, a veil that gives shifting patterns of light and shade, and a sense of  depth, movement and dynamism to the building.

The roof is a 15m grid made up of a series of glulam beams, forming a cassette within a steel frame. This gives a floating quality to the roof and allows for massive rooflights in the centre, bringing daylight deep into the plan of the building.

What were the key challenges on-site and during the build?
Two that spring to mind were at the ground and roof planes.

The ground-floor slab required loads of pits to be cast into it – for engine testing and fuel sumps and for car-lift hydraulics. So there was quite a complex, time-consuming ground plane construction before you could build on top of it.

Also, in constructing the huge roof plane, the big question was how do you deal during construction with rain building up on a massive flat roof? It was necessary to keep draining it during its construction and in the months before getting it fully waterproof.

Internally also, getting the structural tolerances of the raised floors and structure below was very tricky: in the design hall the requirement is 0.2mm deflection across a 50m span while supporting 3-5 tons of car above.

How did you look to incorporate sustainable principles in the design?
The building was designed fully in Revit, so it was possible to do embodied carbon calculations and it's just over 1,000 kgCO2/m² – pretty good, especially for a building that has quite a lot of concrete, which is necessary to ensure this minimum deflection in the structure.

The building is BREEAM Excellent with an EPC 'A' rating. BREEAM Outstanding was seriously investigated but proved impossible to meet on this site, due to the need to attach the building to the university's existing CHP network.

The building promotes wellbeing through the generous daylighting and with its timber roof visible from nearly every space, while wood is touched through hand and leaning rails to guide movement. Sound-absorbing roof coffer infill panels and acoustic rendered upstands line the collaborative hub and allow the research floors to open directly onto it, fostering interaction. Low volatile organic compound finishes were specified for all internal surffaces, floor coverings, and furniture.

We have also just completed the first POE exercise across the entire client group and have committed to a long-term programme of POE.

Outside, as the building is partly sited on what had once been an unused playing field, the challenge was how to enhance the biodiversity of the area of remaining landscape. This was achieved by appointing The Environment Partnership to work alongside Grant Associates from the earliest stage for the soft landscape scheme. Biodiversity was enhanced by including native species planted around the perimeter of the building and providing a water feature using a variety of water plants to encourage habitats. There's a variety of bird and bat boxes at roof level. We also looked to retain existing trees on the site where possible. Four trees that could not be retained were transplanted to new locations.

Architect's view

Designing the NAIC required us all to take an extraordinary journey in response to a unique brief that co-located industry, research and academia into the heart of the University of Warwick's campus. Early discussions refined some key ambitions:

• To foster innovation and collaboration across disciplines
• To connect academic and manufacturing research
• To inspire a new generation of engineers
• To showcase forward thinking in British engineering and design

As a large, immensely complex assembly of spaces, the challenge was to design a building that was immediately legible. We looked for simplicity, and a strength of purpose – a 'big picture', while editing and managing the thousands of detailed decisions that are made by a large team of clients and consultants, all of which have the potential to confuse essential visual clarity.

To develop the interior, we held consultations with all the research teams to come up with a workplace design that offers a huge variety of work settings, from individual booths to large spaces for the weekly assembly of specialist teams, all gathered around the collaborative hub. Flexible walls help corral research teams and their portfolio of projects.

Roddy Langmuir, practice leader, Cullinan Studio

Engineer's view

The engineering contribution from Arup comprised of the civil, structural, mechanical, electrical and public health as well as specialist façades and lighting groups. We provided full CSMEP design services from inception to completion.

Our structural engineers developed the largest glulam roof structure in Europe in close collaboration with Cullinan Studio and glulam specialists to achieve a high level of aesthetic and design detail. The exposed concrete frame and design studio upper floor were designed to meet specific deflection criteria to allow cutting-edge precision measuring accuracy next to excess vehicle-imposed loads, leading to increased productivity and use of the upper floor space.

MEP services were skilfully integrated into the building, providing the functional requirements without sacrificing the architectural and aesthetic intent. Examples include the combination of roof drainage into column designs at the upper office floor, and the multi-service columns in the engineering hall, which incorporate bespoke displacement ventilation outlets as well as feature lighting and power/data outlets.

Arup was instrumental in designing the structure and MEP services to achieve a BREEAM Excellent rating and an EPC rating Class A. The project partners targeted energy reduction as its preference over pursuing a sustainability certification rating for the facility. We therefore tailored the building services design accordingly to improve energy consumption through the use of cooling towers, capturing heat recovery from compressed air units to pre-heat the hot water circuit and other specified energy efficient heat recovery devices. We used on-site CHP for heating, roof-mounted photovoltaics, regenerative electrical energy from the process plant, a low embodied energy glulam roof structure, free-cooling chillers, and displacement ventilation within the engineering hall using the thermal mass of the concrete frame.

Mark Bartlett, associate director, Arup

Project data

Start on site April 2015
Completion January 2019
Gross internal floor area 33,330m²
Construction cost £85 million (including base fit-out)
Construction cost per m² £2,550
Architect Cullinan Studio
Client University of Warwick, Tata Motors, Jaguar Land Rover, WMG (Warwick Manufacturing Group)
Structural engineer Arup
M&E consultant Arup
Quantity surveyor Rider Levett Bucknall
Project manager Rider Levett Bucknall
CDM co-ordinator Rider Levett Bucknall
Approved building inspectorBureau Veritas
Main contractor Balfour Beatty
Civil engineerArup
Fire engineerBuroHappold, Fire Guidance
AcousticianBuroHappold
Planning consultantTurley
Interiors fit-outCullinan Studio, Penson
Specialist lightingArup
Signage and wayfinding Maynard
Landscape architectGrant Associates
CAD software used Revit

Environmental performance data

On-site energy generation191 MWh/yr (PVs only)
Heating and hot water load30.11 kWh/m²/yr
Total energy load (regulated)69.03 kWh/m²/yr
Carbon emissions (all)49.07 kgCO₂/m²
Airtightness at 50pa2.9 m³/hr/m²
Overall area-weighted U-value0.42 W/m²K
Embodied/whole-life carbon1,080 kgCO₂eq/m²
Predicted design life60 years

Warwick University New Car Design Automotive Building

Source: https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/buildings/building-study-national-automotive-innovation-centre-by-cullinan-studio

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