The Entopia Building
The Entopia Building
We worked with Askew Cavanna Architects to open up and redesign the interior spaces of the Soil Association’s headquarters in Bristol, providing Wellbeing consultancy and MEP engineering as part of this reimagining of a modern workplace.
Askew Cavanna
Soil Association
Undisclosed
2018
The Soil Association is the UK’s leading membership charity campaigning for healthy, humane and sustainable food, farming and land use. In 2017, and looking for its own permanent home in the centre of Bristol, the Soil Association appointed us alongside Askew Cavanna to redesign and refurbish a four-storey, 1960s office block with the principles of agile working, staff wellbeing, and healthy living. Sustainability was core to the brief, with a desire to open up the workspaces to natural light and airflows, and to reduce energy consumption throughout.
After a review of the existing services, our MEP strategy minimised energy consumption, increasing natural ventilation to reduce the reliance on the existing refrigerant cooling systems. Suspended ceilings were removed to increase daylight penetration and improve views to outside. The new headquarters have been fitted with new efficient LED lights as well as large areas of glazing. The internal meeting rooms have fully glazed fronts, which maintain the daylight level throughout the building, providing comfortable and quiet spaces. All staff now enjoy natural daylight and views out. The new space also provides a number of new facilities including secure bike storage, shower and drying rooms, organic food demonstration area and cafe.
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Central to the brief and to the MEP designs was staff wellbeing – articulated in a series of staff workshops and guided by our specialist Wellbeing consultants. For the Soil Association’s staff, a truly sustainable building was one that people like being in.
Our Wellbeing Canvas is a tool for capturing a client's wellbeing brief and guiding the project's design towards high workspace effectiveness outcomes. Our Canvas captures how the client’s work culture supports the basic psychological needs (autonomy, mastery and relatedness to others), identifies how key functional needs could be met, and sets out the ways in which management practices and design can be combined to foster higher psychological needs in the workplace, such as personalisation, a sense of belonging, and supporting ‘flow’. At each design stage, emerging design decisions are measured against the Canvas to evaluate how successfully the design will perform against the stated wellbeing objectives.
For the Soil Association, we provided an early-stage collaborative service centred on our Wellbeing Canvas. Through the associated workshop we identified the positive attributes in the Association’s working culture that should be maintained, as well as the key areas where there was room for improvement. We translated these key points into a single page Wellbeing brief that was used to inform and monitor the design right through until construction. The outcome of our work is an office that responds more effectively to user needs, and (as evidenced by feedback) creates a pleasant and appreciated work environment.
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