Speaking at Education Estates Conference

Paul Baxter and James Eades have been invited to speak at this year's Education Estates Conference, one of the main professional gatherings for everyone concerned with education's built environment. Now in its third year, the conference is held from 10 to 11 November in Manchester and features over 60 speakers, with specialist content streams for Schools, Colleges & Universities.

James will be talking about how student satisfaction plays an increasingly important role when determining estate strategy and will refer to Nicholas Hare Architects' design of UCL's new Student Centre. Close collaboration across a broad spectrum of the UCL population has formed the context for the development of the brief, which includes overcoming several significant estates obstacles to achieve long-term ambitions.

Paul's talk will focus on our James Dyson Building (Department of Engineering) for the University of Cambridge. His case study will examine how, in addition to its many sustainable virtues, the flexibility of the deep open-plan space allows research groups to expand and contract over time, and provides a long-term future for the building should the Department decide to vacate its current campus.