An apparently low-tech shed in Dagenham is home to this laboratory for UCL, which uses 1:1 modelling to test how people use the built environment, writes Nile Bridgeman. Photography James Tye and Timothy Soar
1 June 2022 · By Nile Bridgeman
PEARL, the Person Environment Activity Research Laboratory, is a seemingly low-tech shed in Dagenham whose objective is to ‘create a world where everyone can experience an improved quality of life through better design of the environment’. Inside is an endlessly reconfigurable 34,000m3 black box for real-world recreations at 1:1, complete with entirely controllable lighting, acoustics and aroma.
The Penoyre & Prasad-designed laboratory opened less than a year ago on the northern edge of an incomplete industrial estate. The people-centric spirit of the work and research that happens within is in stark contrast to the utilitarian structure’s anonymous, car-centric setting. A meandering tarmac road is bordered by nondescript warehouses and offices wrapped in the institutional cladding synonymous with business-park architecture.
PEARL’s singular form and envelope of jet black corrugated metal give it a commanding presence within the amorphous site. The façade’s material palette avoids the tropes of its neighbours, as does the very welcome change in surface, tarmac giving way to a mix of sand-coloured, stone-flecked roads, soft grey paving and a grass-green strip, reminiscent of a running track, which leads to the entrance.
Immersive environments can be created under controlled conditions within a vast matt black canvas
The track runs past a single-storey listed building with a slim, sinusoidal roof. This was once the café of the site’s former owner, May & Baker Pharmaceuticals. It sits directly opposite PEARL’s, 9m-tall, scalloped Cor-ten façade, which is partly a nod to the only other building of merit, partly a metaphor for the collaboration residing within, and partly the final piece of the fixed-up wayfinding puzzle.
Abstracted, shifting perforations animate the Cor-ten and echo the movement of people. Penoyre & Prasad principal Ian Goodfellow says each perforation can be read as ‘individual ideas that swirl together and continue into the building’. He also notes that aside from being an artistic analogy, the graphic façade and path were designed to ‘improve wayfinding within the nondescript site, particularly for those who come to be involved in the experiments’.
As well as bringing a refreshing clarity and quality, the track serves as a prelude to what happens inside. It is the first experiment you encounter and is ever-so-slightly soft underfoot, like the spongy surfaces found around playground apparatus. It forms the basis for a study on the benefits softer walkways have on ageing joints, and whether their widespread adoption could mitigate future health risks.
Inside, the scale and ambition of the exhibitions is even more mighty, facilitated by an architecture of adaptability and precision. PEARL seeks to improve the built environment and the way people of all abilities interact with it. In the main laboratory area, the Space, entirely immersive environments can be created under controlled conditions within a matt black canvas so large that the perimeter of the space is deliberately beyond your vision.
Full immersion, 3D soundscapes, injected aromas, and lighting capable of recreating any colour the human eye can detect create the setting for UCL researchers to conduct experiments analysing human behaviour in an endless array of urban settings: how bus signage works on a foggy highway for those with visual impairments; the effectiveness of hearing aids in a pizza restaurant; at which frequency e-scooters should emit noise so they can be heard at busy junctions without significantly contributing to ‘urban sound’; and soon, a 1:1 mock-up of a St Paul’s Cathedral fragment in order to analyse how sound reverberates around it. Even PEARL’s predecessor, a small lab in Tufnell Park, has been faithfully reproduced in order to continue controlled experiments that began there.
Nick Tyler, director of the UCL Centre for Transport Studies, describes PEARL as ‘a building to house the world’. The Space is saturated with sophisticated equipment while theatre consultant Charcoal Blue provided expert insight into creating lifelike sets.
The T-shaped lab is flanked by timber-clad workspace and storage concealed by curtains on each side, with a plant space designed to evolve with the times along its distant end. Floors are a pale power-floated concrete, whose tolerances are as tightly controlled as the experiments. Suspended from the primary ceiling structure sits a tight, rigorous grid of galvanised theatre-style trusses carrying lighting, speakers, cameras, sensors and other equipment.
Tyler is a jazz enthusiast, and each room intentionally embodies something of the genre’s collaborative, free, incidental nature. Rooms are also aptly named after components of jazz: the aforementioned Space has an adjoining free-standing cross-laminated timber structure, the Groove, which houses in its two storeys a mix of academic workspace (the Riff), community facing facilities (the Rise), and workshops and maker spaces (the Vibe).
The Groove is located on the north-west corner, neatly housing the entrance and ancillary functions. The two elevations that adjoin the Space are clad in undulating softwood studs. They appear scalloped, like the façade, and acoustic fabric sits in the voids. On the second storey, a series of sizable windows and a terrace running the length of the volume connect academics to adjacent experiments.
On this level, researchers are encouraged to ‘create the space they want’. An open floor plan is designed to facilitate collaborative working and is filled with flexible furniture designed by the practice. Meeting rooms, a kitchen and dining area, study booths and a snug add order, definition and character to the plan. One side opens to the lab below; the other has unbroken views towards a distant nature reserve.
PEARL has achieved BREEAM Outstanding, and is expected to be UCL’s first carbon-negative building in operation, due to its efficient structure, services, fabric and roof full of photovoltaics. It is built for deconstruction and a circular economy, maximising the use of prefabricated and recyclable materials while minimising waste. This cutting-edge facility, designed for continual adaptation, has continually exceeded its client’s already lofty ambitions. In Tyler’s words: ‘PEARL really works, and I truly believe we got it right.’
To take such an exhaustive brief with such fine tolerances, within an uninspiring site, and finish with a building of simplicity and nuance is laudable. If the experimental prototype is confirmed as carbon negative in operation it will be elevated to something more special and more necessary: a data-driven thesis on a more sustainable architecture, ready for a circular economy.
White-painted plasterboard walls, neutral carpet tiles and subdued office furniture mean that the Groove, Riff, Rise and Vibe are often simplistic, in contrast to the character of the laboratory. In its strength and singularity, the Space is the true success – an astoundingly flexible, finely-tuned, black box, that allows the exciting experiments to take centre stage.
As UCL’s first net-zero carbon in-use building, PEARL demonstrates the university’s strategic commitment to lead by example and operate in a sustainable way. The BREEAM Outstanding building is carbon negative in operation (regulated and unregulated) due to its highly efficient fabric, services and the production of its own energy from a vast array of photovoltaics covering the roof.
The client’s extraordinary brief for ‘a building to house the world’ clearly required a highly versatile spatial solution! With a floor area of approximately 4,000m2, a volume of 44,000m3, and 10m high, the laboratory space has been designed and engineered with 40m clear structural spans to house hugely varied research experiments. Equipped with indoor ambient environments and sound systems, the laboratory can test the impact of ‘real life’ environmental conditions, such as lighting, smell, touch and sound, on people’s behaviour and perception. The interior is entirely black and the background sound level and reverberation are very low – core aspects of the building’s design – to provide a blank canvas for the experiments.
The Groove, a two-storey freestanding cross-laminated timber structure, houses the public entrance, community-facing facilities, workshops and highly flexible academic workspaces. Its high levels of daylight and warm, natural timber finishes make it a counterpoint to the lab.
PEARL has been built for deconstruction and the circular economy. Its design maximises the use of recycled and recyclable materials while minimising waste from site through off-site prefabrication and cut-and-fill site preparation.
The facility aims to be a hub for the local community and is already working closely with multiple schools and colleges across the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Ian Goodfellow, principal, Penoyre & Prasad
PEARL is a unique facility to explore the ways in which people interact with their environment. We can create life-sized environments under controlled conditions, so that we can examine how people interact with their surroundings at a variety of scales: spatially, from neurons to city blocks; and temporally, from nanoseconds to decades.
This comprehensive approach is based on the idea that everything we know about the world comes via our sensory systems. People tend to treat their senses independently, but the human brain-body considers them all together to create the perceptions of the world that we have, that then inform the decisions we make. This brings human beings’ physical, neurological, psychological and physiological responses into focus to inform the design of environments so that people can live a healthier life with better wellbeing, and an enhanced sense of sociality.
Penoyre & Prasad’s design enables us to create an actively collaborative working environment so that it is easy for researchers to work with each other and members of the public to create a truly new world, better for people and planet. Nick Tyler, director of the Centre for Transport Studies, UCL CEGE
The design strategy for this zero carbon-in-use, BREEAM Outstanding building followed the established energy hierarchy: ‘lean, clean, green’. Calculations were based on the National Calculation Methodology, as used to demonstrate compliance with Part L 2013.
For the ‘lean’ stage, we pursued a good-practice approach to demand reduction measures, and included high-performance building fabric and airtightness combined with mechanical ventilation with heat recovery of at least 70 per cent.
Fans within the main lab space reduce stratification of warm air in the unoccupied zones at any one time. Solar shading to the reception space’s large area of west-facing glazing limits the effects of heat gains in the summer.
The ‘clean’ stage considered the heating infrastructure. The heat demand profile is seasonal with strong correlation to ambient air temperature. Demand for domestic hot water is fairly limited by the building type, resulting in a low base heat load to improve on. Air-source heat pumps in tandem with the lean measures achieve a 20 per cent improvement over Building Regulations.
For the ‘green’ stage, PV arrays were required to meet the planning policy target and UCL’s own target. During design development, UCL chose to invest in extending the proposed PV installation across the whole roof to circa 693kWp installation, providing the university with its first net zero regulated and unregulated carbon emissions building. This is being monitored by UCL over the first three years. Greg Harris, associate, Stantec
Externally, the building’s form and materials relate to the site’s industrial architectural heritage; crisp detailing and weathered steel to the west façade provide a contemporary twist. The west façade is scalloped to reference the roof form of PEARL’s Grade II-listed neighbour, one of the first examples of a shell concrete structure in the UK. The 9m-high, rusted steel panels gradually fan out across the frontage, providing shading to the Groove’s glazed curtain walling and signalling the main entrance to PEARL.
Self-supporting, insulated panels with perforated inner steel lining for acoustic absorption span 7m between primary steel columns and form the external envelope and airtight line. Profiled steel rainscreen cladding and weathered steel are in turn fixed to and hung from these 100 per cent recyclable insulated panels.
This detail illustrates how these elements all come together and interface with the structurally independent cross-laminated timber box of the Groove.
Perforations in the steel mediate the scale and bring a sense of movement to the façade. Repetitive patterns can cause distressing visual noise for people with sensory or neurological conditions. Working with UCL’s Nick Tyler and his team, we looked to natural, non-linear imagery – people flow and crowd movement – both of which are key areas of research inside the building.
The three-dimensional and abstract nature of the perforations also represent the flow of individual and collaborative ideas that swirl together and continue into the building to inspire the research that turns these ideas into innovations for the design of future environments. Michael Fostiropoulos, senior associate, Penoyre & Prasad
Start on site: January 2020 Completion: March 2021 Gross internal floor area: 5,650m2 Construction cost (excluding specialist fit-out): £20 million Construction cost per m2: £3,540 Architect: Penoyre & Prasad Client: University College London (UCL) Structural engineer: Atkins M&E consultant: Stantec Quantity surveyor: Turner & Townsend Access consultant: Transport Consultant Landscape architect: Atkins Planning consultant: Be First Fire strategy: Buro Happold Acoustics design: Stantec BREEAM assessor: Peter Brett Associates Heritage consultant: JLL Heritage Signage consultant: Placemarque Theatre consultant: CharcoalBlue Project manager: AECOM Principal designer: Penoyre & Prasad Approved building inspector: Bureau Veritas Main contractor: VolkerFitzpatrick CAD software used: ArchiCAD Annual CO2 emissions: -12.38 KgCO2/m2 (from as built BRUKL / EPC)
Percentage of floor area with daylight factor >2%/>5%: Analysis not undertaken On-site energy generation: PV installation (693kWp) covering approximately 129% of building usage. Worked out from BRUKL as follows: PV generation: 97.63 kWh/m²/yr; Consumption: 75.66 kWh/m²; 100% depending how much energy is used in experiments Heating load: 4.19 kWh/m2/yr Hot water load: 3.67 kWh/m²/yr Total energy load: 35.89 kWh/m²/yr (regulated); 39.77 (unregulated, estimate from BRUKL) Building carbon emission rate: -12.38 kgCO2/m² (carbon negative in operation) Annual mains water consumption: 3.69 m³/occupant/year (estimate from BREAM calculator) Airtightness at 50Pa: 2.73 m³/hr/m² (from air test certificate) Overall thermal bridging heat transfer coefficient (Y value): Floor: 0.022 w/m2k; external wall: 0.015 w/m²k; roof: 0.015 w/m²k; windows: 0.153 w/m²k; partition wall: 0.179 w/m²k Embodied/whole-life carbon: 9.40 e + 6 kgCO2eq/m² over 60 years Predicted design life: 60 years +
Tags Dagenham Laboratory penoyre and prasad Research UCL
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