Universities are rethinking what a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) building is actually for. The buildings being commissioned are starting to reflect this shift.
Universities have been under growing pressure to show that what they build and teach is worth the money. Just last month, a report by the Policy Institute at King’s College London drawing on research from several European university systems revealed that the proportion of adults holding degrees had risen sharply, while what graduates could expect to earn had become harder to predict.
As this pressure builds, more in the industry are realising that the STEM estate they have inherited was built for a version of STEM education that has since moved on.
Universities are moving away from collections of separate departmental buildings towards fewer, larger spaces shared by different disciplines. Picture a typical university physics department. Every room has a designated function: lectures in one place, labs in another, staff offices down the corridor. If you have ever been on a university open day, you will have walked through buildings that still look more or less exactly like this.
A building with no capacity to absorb changes stops being an asset and starts being a constraint
Now picture what a well-designed STEM building tends to look like today. There are project spaces where a materials scientist and a computer science student can work through the same project side by side; informal areas that a group has made its own for something between a seminar and a planning session; and corridors wide enough for a conversation to happen without blocking the flow.
Much of the most productive STEM learning now takes place in the gaps between formal teaching, through the friction of different disciplines working in proximity. Universities are increasingly designing with this in mind from the outset, treating informal encounters as something to plan for, rather than leave to chance.
The University of Warwick’s £700m STEM investment points in this direction. So does the University of Portsmouth’s £250m campus transformation (pictured), which our architecture team has built around a continuous ‘spine’ of linked teaching, research and social spaces running through the heart of the city.
The thinking behind Portsmouth’s approach is that if you want students and researchers from different fields to encounter each other and collaborate, you need to design for movement and connection, rather than departmental separation. Estate planning and academic strategy have become, for these institutions, the same conversation.
Reorientating development
So far, so good. The more pressing question is what this reorientation means for the schemes being designed and funded right now. A university submitting a brief for a new STEM building five years ago might have specified exact requirements, stating how many lecture theatres, lab benches and seminar rooms of a given size were needed. These numbers typically came from timetables, headcounts and what departments said they needed based on how they worked. Schemes were designed tightly around those figures, because tighter briefs are cheaper to deliver.
The problem is that the assumptions behind these figures are shifting faster than the buildings designed around them. A STEM environment commissioned today on the basis of fixed room counts and departmental separation might be serving a university whose teaching model looks quite different by the time it is a decade into its operational life.
This risk is becoming difficult to ignore. AI and new technologies are changing how STEM subjects are taught and studied at a pace that is hard to confidently predict. Changes in how students work are spilling over to changes in what they need a physical environment to enable.
A building with no capacity to absorb these changes stops being an asset and starts being a constraint well before anyone planned for it, with the potential to leave both the institution and those who funded or developed it weighing an expensive retrofit against a decade of workarounds.
The conversations we are having as an industry now look different from those of five years ago. Universities are asking harder questions about how a building will perform across its lifetime, what happens if their priorities shift and how much room a scheme leaves for things to change. The rest of the industry would do well to be asking the same.
As seen in Property Week: Ridge & Partners’ Leonardo Ali on why STEM design needs a new syllabus | Property Week
Leonardo Ali is a Senior Associate within out Architecture team. You can contact him on leoali@ridge.co.uk
