This building won 'Best Public Building' at the 2007 Scottish Design Awards, and is the first significant contemporary addition to the historic St Andrews town centre campus for 30 years.
It accommodates the Department of International Relations along with academic and research offices, seminar rooms and social spaces. A cloistered open logia creates an open forum ringing life and community to this central hub of the university.
Notable within the services design is the predominantly natural ventilation philosophy of the academic offices utilising air transfer to the open logia spaces and stack effect to auto opening roof ventilators. Seminar rooms, social spaces and auditoria have been provided with variable volume full fresh air displacement ventilation with heat recovery.
No mechanical cooling is provided – a bulk air flow TAS simulation model of the building demonstrated the environmental performance of the building using the design philosophy.
