Imperial College London’s Scale Space scheme provides flexible office and laboratory space accommodation for high-tech, high-growth businesses on is 23 acre White City Campus.

Imperial College London’s Scale Space scheme provides flexible office and laboratory space accommodation for high-tech, high-growth businesses on is 23 acre White City Campus and sees the delivery of 25,500m2 of employment-generating accommodation for specialist companies associated with research and development, technology and education.

For this project Imperial College have collaborated with technology incubator company Blenheim Chalcot to fuse educational and private sector uses under one roof. The combination of educational, business and research activities in one building follows the client’s vision to provide cutting edge education with real world applications.

In order to meet the clients brief for high quality, yet fast delivery of the project, right from the outset the design has been developed as an off-site manufacture structure with the main structural elements pre-fabricated as three dimensional structural modules and delivered to site ready for installation. The client's high aspirations for design meant that the building cannot appear as a series of assembled containers. A low cost and fast build facade panel system is also utilised to ensure a weather tight envelope is created early on in the construction stages in order to allow interior and exterior finishing trades to work and complete in parallel.

The design of the scheme has been developed into three 4 storey buildings which all provide a mix of flexible office, research and development spaces as well as specialist clean room laboratory environments. Other uses in the space comprise a communal lobby, welcome and cafe space at ground floor.

The high quality finishing and efficiencies which can be achieved within the factory, prior to delivery on site has greatly decreased the overall programme meaning that despite its size of over 10,000 m2 Gross Internal Area (GIA), the first Building A had been constructed on site within a 52 week programme.