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Architects: BDP
- Area: 25000 m²
- Year: 2015
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Photographs:David Barbour
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Manufacturers: Architectural Panel Solutions
Text description provided by the architects. The Technology and Innovation Centre (TIC) for the University of Strathclyde is an eight storey collaborative research and conference centre in the heart of Glasgow. The building provides specialist laboratories, research spaces and collaborative meeting spaces for around 900 staff. Additionally the building provides conference facilities and meeting rooms, including a 450 and 150 seat auditorium.
The TIC project promotes knowledge exchange by stimulating the exchange of ideas and expertise with business and public sector organisations in a way that will improve university-business entrepreneurship, industry engagement and research commercialisation through strategic industry focussed partnerships, networks, mutual leverage and value.
Through collaboration and consultation between the client group and the design team, the desire was to create a landmark building as befits the civic status of the facility. The building needed to be flexible and fully accessible with easily re-configurable spaces, as well as being highly environmentally sustainable.
The building form is relatively simple. The triangular ring of accommodation is highly flexible and efficient in terms of circulation and service space requirements. Natural daylight is afforded to the great majority of spaces, either via the external façade or by way of the central atrium space.
The range of space types contained illustrates a more complex character with regards to the detailed planning of the building itself. The specialist lab and workshop spaces sit alongside research workspace accommodation and the knowledge exchange and social elements that form the spiritual heart of the development.
The TIC is triangular in plan to exploit the available site area. This form results in a building that is a unique intervention into the urban matrix, whilst respecting its surroundings. The TIC has a deliberately expressive form, but rather than form making for its own sake, the building massing is a result of consideration of the brief and the site context. TIC is higher along the North frontage (rising to 8 storeys) to take best advantage of diffuse natural light and to create a civic presence on George Street. The building drops in scale towards the South to tie in with existing neighbouring buildings.
The TIC is the cornerstone of Scotland’s International Technology and Renewable Energy Zone (ITREZ) which is a global research and development hub, bringing business and academia together to work together on the development of the offshore renewables sector.
BDP was appointed in Feb 2011 to develop the project to RIBA Stage D and prepare tender information. Planning approval was granted in Feb 2012 and work on site started in Aug 2012 under a single stage lump sum Design& Build contract. Completion of the building, which also included fit out for laboratories, was in Feb 2015.
