Sports Centre, University of Birmingham

The brick bond comprises three rows of stretchers and one row of headers. The brick surfaces are animated by panels in relief and textured patterning, giving each segment of building a distinctive appearance while breaking up what would otherwise be very large expanses of blank wall. The car park’s façade, for instance, has vertical open slots to create a grilled wall for ventilation. 

The main entrance to the west, approached by this colonnade and accessed from the A38, pulls forward from the swimming pool block. This section is cowelled in bronze to give it accent. Inside there’s a lofty entrance lobby, dominated by a climbing wall served from a balcony at first floor level. A café leads off to the right, overlooking the pool, while access to all the sports facilities is directly ahead. The service spine runs up from entrance, containing all changing facilities – dry change at ground level and wet change a half-level down. Due to the slope, the spine aligns with the level of the swimming pool to the south. 

The swimming pool itself sits under a glulam-beamed roof and is designed with flexibility of use in mind. Its full Olympic size can be divided by a boom into two 25m-long pools, while a moveable floor on one means its depth can be reduced to just 0.5m if required for tuition.  Next to it, at the eastern end, are stacked two generous daylit dance class studios, gym facilities – with glimpses through to the swimming pool and squash courts – and laboratories and consulting rooms. In the strip to the north, sports halls provide competition-quality spaces, painted blue for super-high definition broadcast and fitted with retractable bleacher seating. 

Despite the contingencies of ventilation and swimming pool plant, the building is rated BREEAM Excellent. The M&E services team of Couch Perry Wilkes worked closely with Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands to ensure sustainability was embedded into the design from the start. This manifested itself in an efficient building form combined with enhanced envelope U-values to encourage excellent levels of daylight in the pool area and to limit heat loss throughout.

With the building’s inherent energy demands curbed, it was down to the M&E team to appropriately service the development’s zones, building on its skills gained in recent large-scale Passivhaus design projects, and decarbonising the energy supply to meet the challenging EPC A-rating target.