Herzog & de Meuron’s RIBA prize-winner Laban suffers for its art

• Designed to architectural acclaim, the operation of the award winning dance centre has been marred by poor performing services.
• Centre director Anthony Bowne fumes at lack of instruction on how to operate his new building that was incomplete on occupation.
• Occupancy survey reveals the extent of user dissatisfaction with only the building’s image to visitors rating as good.
• Engineering analysis includes in-depth energy consumption and potential areas for change/improvement.

When it opened in spring 2003 the Laban centre for contemporary dance was a spectacular addition to a rundown part of south east London. It was designed by Swiss architectural duo Herzog & de Meuron and it won RIBA's Stirling Prize for Architecture later that year. At the time the judges described it as an extraordinarily fine building that makes a major contribution to the artistic life of the community while acting as a catalyst to the regeneration of the whole area.

Now, four years later, this hyper-modern building clad in its translucent skin of polycarbonate still looks magnificent, if slightly surreal situated on the edge of muddy Deptford Creek and surrounded by decaying blocks of council flats, scrap yards and industrial warehouses.

But while students of architecture continue to coo about the building's daring design and debate the aesthetic merits of polycarbonate cladding, the occupants have been struggling to get the building to work. For the dance school the real issue over the past four years is not the relative merits, or otherwise, of tinted polycarbonate but the on-going effort to get the building's services to meet their needs. "The building's heating and ventilation was an absolute nightmare," says Anthony Bowne, Laban's director. "It is a highly complex system. We didn't know how to run it, and there was no one there to show us how to - they'd all done a runner."

There is no denying that with Laban the architect succeeded in creating a stunning architectural solution to the schools brief. This two-storey concrete-framed building has two shorter end walls interlinked by curving elevations. These curving facades are clad in strips of lime-, turquoise- and magenta-tinted semi-translucent polycarbonate panels, separated from the building by an 800 mm gap. Areas of clear glazing punctuate this plastic skin, framing the dancers within. During the day the facades have a cloudy, ephemeral appearance like a milky bubble. But at night the polycarbonate allows the entire building to glow with colour.

Behind this facade is an 8000 m2 interior, at the heart of which is a 300-seat raked theatre complete with fly-tower for storing stage backdrops. Surrounding this theatre the architect had packed in 13 lofty dance studios (two on the ground floor; the remainder on the first floor), a library, a public cafe, a physiotherapy unit, offices for support staff and various minor rooms all of which are accessible from the building's two main corridors.

However, when the dance school took possession of its spectacular new premises in Autumn 2002 its enthusiasm for the look of its new home soon became tempered by the knowledge that the main contractor, Ballast Southern, had gone into administration just as the building was reaching completion. According to Bowne this setback meant some snagging issues remained unresolved. "With the contractor going into administration after completion there was no one we could call back to the site," he explains.

The first major difficulty says Bowne was that for an occupant new to the building, there were no operation and maintenance manuals provided for the services so the school had to run the ventilation and heating services blind. "The reality for us was that there were too many variables so that when something was not working properly we did not know whether it was an issue with the one thing or a combination of different issues”. He says it has taken a couple of years to master the building services: "We spent two years where we had two winters where we were often too cold and two summers where we were often way too hot." And he correctly predicts, "I think it is under control now but I expect because of these earlier problems the user survey will get a poor reaction from the staff."

Reg Fitch is the facilities manager who has worked with the system from the outset. As a former banker, his financial background meant he had little experience to prepare him for the challenge that lay ahead. "If Laban was a hand of cards I'd been dealt I'd have thrown them straight back," he says.

Andy Keelin was the building services engineer for consultants Whitbybird. He admits the scheme had a "difficult birth" but he appears surprised by the client's complaints. He says the systems would have had to been working properly for the consultants to have signed them off on behalf of the client and a maintenance contractor would have to have been in place for a year after handover for the plant warranties to be valid. "We would have had to witness the systems working for sign-off at practical completion," he says. He does concede, however, that the systems would still need to be fine-tuned over their first year in operation.

Ballast Southern subcontracted the M&E services installation to Emcor. The contractor concurs with Whitbybird regarding the commissioning and snagging. In a statement to BSj it says: "All services were commissioned, witnessed and signed off in full by the main contractor and the building services consultant," and "final defects were signed off by the client at post practical completion handover stage". The contractor is also keen to make clear that any issues regarding Ballast's financial position "had no impact on the project for Emcor" and it is at a loss to explain the disappearance of the project's O&M manuals, which it states "were issued to Ballast Southern in a full and final state prior to practical completion".

Ventilation

Unusually on this project the outline design for the services was provided by the Swiss architects. Whitbybird then took the scheme and worked it up to detail design. Fresh air is supplied to the Laban building by two separate systems, one serving all the dance studios the other serving general areas such as corridors. Each system is fed from an air-handling unit concealed in a sunken well on the roof to preserve the architect's precious roof profile. But this arrangement has created problems for both air-handling units.

Squeezing the large double-deck air handling unit serving the dance studios into the tiny plant-well, so that its adjacent supply and exhaust louvres are about 1m from the wall, has caused short circuiting problems. As a result of the wall's proximity air from the units exhaust was found to be short-circuiting into the adjacent intake louvre. According to Fitch this resulted in a 2ºC increase in air temperature at the intake. It may also have reduced the amount of fresh air supplied to the building, which might go some way to explaining the "breathlessness" reported by some of the dancers. To overcome this problem, Fitch designed and fitted a vertical baffle plate, which he had fabricated locally, to separate the intake from the exhaust (see photographs).

A similar problem existed on the double deck air-handling unit serving the general areas. Here a curved cowl has had to be installed to direct hot exhaust air out of the pit and away from the intake below. Both problems would appear to have arisen as a result of the squeezing these large air handling units into such a small space. The consultants admit that this was a poor solution under the circumstances: "It is not an excuse, we should have dealt with that better," acknowledges Keelin.

The temperature and volume of supply air has also been an issue for the staff. The dance studios have underfloor heating combined with a displacement ventilation system balanced to achieve a positive pressure.

Control of the system relies on Fitch’s intervention. "We can react quickly to sort out an issue provided people tell me whether it is too hot or too cold," he says. It’s Fitch's eyes and ears keep the building services ticking over. He walks the building several times a day. If anything needs to be adjusted he does this through the building's Trend building management system. He says he finds it relatively easy to alter the control settings for the heating, ventilation and cooling. "The controls are very effective," he says.

It is in the smaller admin offices that staff are most vociferous about the environmental conditions - a situation no doubt exacerbated by the lack of individual control over temperature and daylight. According to Fitch, in many of these rooms the number of occupants has increased over time, and so has the demand on cooling and fresh air. The Registry, which is occupied by about 10 people has high solar gains, and Fitch has had to install additional fresh air supply ductwork to help air distribution in the room following complaints from the staff about air short-circuiting to the extract grille. Another problem for many of the administration staff is glare on their monitor screens as a result of the building's translucent external walls. Almost all the facades are fully glazed, either in clear glazing or translucent panels.

The consultants, however, are at a loss to explain why the system would still need to be adjusted after four years in operation. "The system has everything in place to enable it to be set up properly," says Keelin.

Lighting

Three courtyards bring daylight deep into the interior of the building's rectangular envelope. There are clear glazed partitions that enclose the dance studios and courtyards, so that you can see the dancers at work. One of the school's key requirements was that all the dance studios should be naturally lit. "Dance will often involve 30 hours of teaching and rehearsal in a studio, a week - so the quality of the environment was very critical to us," explains Bowne.

However daylight introduced issues such as glare. Before construction started, Arup Lighting spent a year working out the colour intensities and levels of light for the dance studios; the consultant even built a half-scale mock-up to test the various solutions. The mock-up also helped to conclude that white diffuse laminated double-glazing was the best glass treatment to soften and diffuse the light coming into the building through the facade to the studios. The solution appears to work well. However, the intensity of these luminous walls does make the students appear as silhouettes against the luminous walls making it difficult to see their facial expressions.

Control of the building's lighting does appear to be a problem. At night the building appears to glow from within. This is a result partly of the building's long hours of occupation - see Box: Energy analysis- and partly because the room lighting controls are not accessible to the building's occupants.

There was also a maintenance issue with the large 'pipe' lights, which were designed by Herzog & de Meuron and manufactured by Artemide for installation in the library and canteen. According to Fitch the fittings cost about £450 each, and are designed with a flexible stem to allow the designers to direct light to where it is required. However, in the canteen some fittings were within reach of the students who had their own ideas as to where the light should be directed, damaging the lamps in the process of re-direction. These fittings have had to be shortened to take them out of reach of the students.

When benchmarked against the similar schemes the building's energy consumption appears to be within acceptable limits - see box: Laban energy analysis. It is likely that some energy issues will be addressed in the future. In 2005, Laban merged with Trinity College of Music to form Trinity Laban. The building now falls under the combined college's FM department. "At the moment the only energy efficiency activity is to reduce the plant run times," says Fitch. "However, following the merger there are plans to monitor energy use more closely and to target those areas where consumption can be reduced further," he adds.