TODD Architects has added a colonnaded business school to the historic Riddel Hall campus at Queen’s University Belfast. Facing Charles Lanyon’s grade II-listed hall across a formal lawn, the three-storey building announces itself as a low-lying pavilion of red-hued precast concrete and brick, with its full form only revealed as the site slopes down into mature woodland.
“The design response was heavily influenced by the site topography, the location of protected trees and the relationship with the listed building,” says Nigel Murray, associate director at TODD. Because the lower level is embedded into the landscape, a reinforced-concrete frame was the obvious choice, and this has been left exposed in all of the public-facing areas. “This is the last available plot within this part of the campus and I think everyone really bought into creating something special. When we knew we would be using concrete, we had a real desire to invest in it and not to add applied surfaces to it.”
There are two main finishes to the concrete: boardmarking to the walls, and a smooth, steel-pan finish to the soffits and horizontal sections where they meet the downstand beams. Both finishes are left as struck, with just the addition of a dust sealant and a plaster fill to the tie bar holes. The boardmarking, which echoes the woodland setting and mirrors the dimensions of the oak panelling used throughout the interior, was created using a rubber formliner on steel formwork. “We did some test panels, and all agreed that this gave the textural quality and level of control that we were looking for,” says Murray. There are also some exposed concrete columns in one of the lecture theatres, which were initially meant to be covered. “They used a paper liner in the circular mould and, lo and behold, they came out like marble. It was absolutely beautiful.”
The building is arranged with the more public spaces on the lower levels and cellular offices and spaces for executive education at the top. Visitors can enter from the formal lawn at level one, from where a stair leads down to the reception, located in a top-lit, linear atrium. This navigational space leads on to two lecture theatres, the main one of which can be subdivided into smaller spaces, a second woodland entrance and a central courtyard. Murray says that a key influence here was the Judge Business School in Cambridge by Stanton Williams (CQ 264). “There are some lovely spaces as you walk through, including an upper courtyard.” At Riddel Hall, the upper offices are arranged so that they either look into the courtyard or out over the treetops.
Externally, the precast colonnades and red brick walls were designed to mirror the brick and sandstone of Lanyon’s hall opposite. Murray adds that two nearby projects – Hall McKnight’s Mack arts centre and O’Donnell + Tuomey’s Lyric Theatre – were used as reference points. The designers and precast manufacturer explored coloured aggregate but eventually chose a pigmented mix with a fine aggregate, cast using metal moulds, to better echo the finish of the sandstone. The external palette is complemented with bronze-framed aluminium and full-height glazing to the teaching spaces. “Hopefully the character of the building is something that's quite measured and quite tempered,” says Murray.
The school has achieved a BREEAM Excellent rating, and includes one of the largest geothermal heat systems in Northern Ireland. This involved driving piles to a depth of 125m beneath the lawn to extract heat from the sandstone substrate and provide constant low-level heat to the building via an underfloor heating system. It is estimated that this will result in a 10% reduction in life cycle costs compared to a gas boiler installation, and a carbon emissions reduction of over 60%.