POST-COVID-19 | OFFICE FLEXIBILITY BUSINESS STUDIES With office occupation in central London not expected to return to pre-Covid levels, Andy Pearson finds out how space has been repurposed for university students at two major developments T he coronavirus pandemic has disrupted normal life in many ways. For millions of Londoners, perhaps the biggest upheaval has been switching from the daily office commute to working from home. Surprisingly, many workers are finding they are happier, healthier and less stressed as homeworkers and according to letting agent Savills when the pandemic ends, many expect to continue working from home for up to three days a week. This partial shift to homeworking coupled with an expected decrease in headcount in organisations, in response to the economic downturn means office occupation in central London is not expected to return to pre-Covid levels. This could result in swathes of empty office space in the city centre, and dealing with it will be a big challenge for many landlords. So, what could be done? One Bartholomew Close One pre-Covid example of how floorspace in a conventional office can be repurposed for academia is demonstrated by One Bartholomew. This 11-storey, 21,000m2 office building, with Cat A fit-out, opened in December 2018 as part of developer Helicals Barts Square development. Earlier this year, the lower floors of this prime City of London office were transformed into a 4,000m2 academic campus for the University of Chicago Booth School of Businesss Executive MBA programme. The offices prime location, with its views of St Pauls Cathedral, made it an attractive European home for the Chicago Booth School of Business, says Giovanni Festa, building services operations director at Sweco, the consultant responsible for the fit-out of the campus. He says the building was also appealing from a building services perspective, because its first and second floors had been designed as loose-fit, flexible, boutique trading floors with an enhanced fresh-air supply (based on one occupant per 6m2 of floor area) and increased small-power provision compared with the more conventional servicing of the upper floors. At BCO 2019 conditions with 1:8m2 occupancy, outdoor air would be 1.65 Ls-1m-2, so 2.2 Ls-1m-2 is a ~33% increase. The university has also leased a large, empty, selfcontained retail unit on the buildings ground floor, which has its own entrance off Bartholomew Square. Architect Sheppard Robsons fit-out scheme for the business schools campus involved punching a hole through the first- and second-floor slabs to enable a new stairway to be inserted, connecting the ground-floor entrance to the first and second floors. The universitys eating area and multi-purpose function space have been located on the ground floor. On the first floor is a large lecture theatre, with tiered seating for 120 people, and numerous six-person cellular meeting/tutorial rooms. The second floor is home to a smaller 70-seat lecture theatre, plus meeting rooms and administration offices. When it came to developing the building services design, Sweco was fortunate in that it was the engineer responsible for the office buildings original base-build services design and Cat A fit-out. Its scheme incorporated two vertical service risers to enable the landlord to subdivide each office floor at the lift core. Under the Cat A scheme, fresh air was ducted from the riser to a series of fan coil units (FCUs) serving perimeter and large internal zones in line with BCO recommendations, located above the false ceiling. The enhanced specification of the original scheme ensured the total quantity of fresh air supplied was sufficient for the universitys total occupancy. The challenge for Sweco, says Festa, was to ensure sufficient Prime City of London ofces were transformed into a campus for Chicago Booth universitys MBA programme (below and above right) 20 December 2020 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE Dec20 pp20-22 Covid office flexibility .indd 20 20/11/2020 14:57