Award-winning landmark buildings

Our university work includes some of the most celebrated buildings in the country. Town House at Kingston University, which we delivered for Grafton Architects, won the 2021 RIBA Stirling Prize and the 2022 Mies van der Rohe Award - a six-storey landmark combining a library, auditorium, dance studios, a studio theatre and a rooftop garden, designed to make students feel they belong.

Half of Kingston's students are the first in their family to attend university, and the building was conceived to welcome them. Teesside University's Student Life building, meanwhile, won a RICS Social Impact Award for the way it puts wellbeing at the heart of campus.

Sustainable and Passivhaus campuses

Sustainability runs through everything we build for universities. We delivered the University of Exeter's Sarah Turvill Multifaith Centre to the Passivhaus Classic standard, using low-carbon porotherm clay blocks, triple glazing, air source heat pumps and solar - a project that deepened our Passivhaus expertise in airtightness, detailing and certification. We built Leicester University's Passivhaus-certified Centre for Medicine, and at the University of Warwick we undertook a whole-life carbon study and are applying our Energy Synergy® service to close the gap between designed and actual performance.

We're also leaders in sustainable retrofit: at Queen Mary University of London's Informatics Teaching Laboratory, we retained the original concrete frame to preserve its embodied carbon, then added two lightweight steel-and-timber storeys to nearly double student capacity.

Specialist research and technical facilities

Universities trust us with their most technically demanding buildings. At Warwick, our £33m Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building brings together 300 researchers across a five-storey laboratory and a 400-seat lecture theatre, built with 50% pre-manufactured value. At the University of Birmingham's School of Engineering — one of several projects in a £465m campus transformation — we created facilities for digital railway research, complete with a hydrogen-powered train track and an anechoic chamber.

The Aberystwyth Innovation and Enterprise Campus houses a seed biobank preserving 35,000 varieties, a biorefining centre and a future food centre, all delivered to BREEAM Excellent.

Student experience, wellbeing and belonging

The modern estate is built around the student. We create indoor student hubs that combine social learning with café-filled atria, and outdoor parks, gardens and squares that support wellbeing.

Teesside University's Student Life building co-locates wellbeing, careers and support services in one welcoming hub - with timber-clad quiet pods designed for autistic students - deliberately blurring the line between learning and support to remove the stigma of seeking help.

Working in live and heritage-sensitive campuses

We understand the sensitivities of building among staff and students. At the University of Birmingham's Teaching and Learning Building, we delivered a major facility on a constrained, high-traffic site at the centre of a live campus, coordinating with other contractors to protect daily life.

We're equally at home on heritage estates - from a student hub within Greenwich's Grade II listed Dreadnought Building, on a World Heritage Site, to new buildings set respectfully within the Grade II listed parkland conservation area at Oxford Brookes.

Long-term university partnerships

Universities come back to us. We delivered six projects for the University of Birmingham in four years, and our long-running partnership with Teesside University spans the Student Life building, a business school with a living green wall, sports facilities and student accommodation - a sustained relationship that helps deliver a coherent, masterplan-led campus.

Examples of our work

• Town House, Kingston University - Stirling Prize and Mies van der Rohe Award-winning landmark building.
• Sarah Turvill Multifaith Centre, University of Exeter - built to the Passivhaus Classic standard.
• Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building, University of Warwick - a £33m research facility, 50% pre-manufactured value.
• Informatics Teaching Laboratory, Queen Mary University of London - a sustainable retrofit and extension nearly doubling capacity.
• Aberystwyth Innovation and Enterprise Campus - a BREEAM Excellent bio-science research hub.
• Student Life Building, Teesside University - a RICS Social Impact Award-winning student wellbeing hub.