CASE STUDY | URBAN SCIENCES BUILDING SENSOR SENSIBILITY Newcastle Universitys Urban Sciences Building has 4,000 sensors to help optimise user comfort and energy performance. Andy Pearson reports T he Urban Sciences Building (USB) at Newcastle University has been designed to improve our understanding of the relationship between buildings and their wider environment. As such, it is wired to more than 4,000 sensors to allow academics to see how it performs and how it interfaces with the energy, water, internet and other networks to which it is connected. The 58m building, which opened in September 2017, is home to the National Green Infrastructure Facility, the National Centre for Energy Systems Integration, the universitys School of Computing, and a series of research laboratories with an agenda to inform future urban infrastructure. It has been designed for teaching, hosting events, laboratory research and crucially for the university as a facility in which to test smart technologies to promote urban sustainability. In short, it is a living laboratory. There was a lot of engagement with the academics who would be using this project. They were tasked with coming up with research projects to establish the technologies that had to be installed at the outset, or that could be bolted on in the future, says Mark Dowson, an associate at BuroHappold Engineering, the schemes MEP engineers. Interior spaces The 58m Urban Sciences Building opened in September 2017 The building is also a test bed for sustainability. As well as achieving Breeam Excellent (with a score of 78.1%), bespoke and auditable sustainability targets were developed by BuroHappold to drive sustainability beyond Breeam. These additional elements covered design, construction and in-use aspects of the building. Achieving Breeam Excellent does not necessarily result in a lowenergy building, says Dowson. It is a fact of which the university is only too aware, as one of its other Breeam Excellent buildings has a Display Energy Certificate (DEC) rating of F. To ensure USB performs as the designers intended, it is undergoing three years of postoccupancy evaluation (POE) as part a soft landings initiative. The USB is the centrepiece of a new development called the Helix, being built on the former Scottish & Newcastle Brewery site in the heart of Newcastle. A triangular-shaped, six-storey building facing onto a new square its 12,800m2 of teaching, research and laboratory space form two sides, while a giant, glazed atrium links these two blocks to complete the triangle. The atrium contains the main entrance and incorporates a lecture theatre, a forum space, showcase labs and a cafe. A staircase leads occupants through creative collision spaces to the quieter research labs, alongside of which are the Urban Observatory and Decision Theatre. These spaces are used to process the huge amounts of data collected by sensors positioned throughout the building and across the city. Unfortunately for the building services engineers, the glazed atrium faces south. It had to point towards the heart of the masterplan, which meant we had to do extensive parametric analysis to optimise the shading and glass performance, says Dowson. Modelling resulted in the addition of a digital artwork to the atrium exterior. This comprises a series of lines, circles and dots a 36 December 2018 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE Dec18 pp36-40 Urban Science centre.indd 36 23/11/2018 16:07