Prior to taking the space they were doing a mix of working at home and in coffee shops.

Indeed, the atrium sets the tone for what is undeniably one of Circle Reading’s key architectural features - space.‘Everything about this place is space,’ says Raj Goel.

‘There’s nice space everywhere.’.The facility generously houses five theatres, thirty inpatient and twenty day case beds, fifteen consulting rooms and an extensive rehabilitation department.Describing the process of layout design for the hospital, Wood notes that the more Bryden Wood understood about the hospital and its patients, the more they were able to ‘codify their operations, their adjacencies and their spaces…’ He discusses the fact that Bryden Wood were able to benefit from a considerable amount of consultation and direct input from the professionals who were actually going to be using the facility.

All of that knowledge was then enshrined into a three dimensional design tool, he says, which became like a ‘vocabulary of spaces…’.Wood also describes how such a level of understanding about the function of the building, led logically to the next step of applying a level of systemization to its construction, in order to underpin it and make construction more efficient.

‘We understood...the scale and the spans that the structure would require’ he says.

This enabled the development of a system which is ‘a hybrid, precast concrete and steel system specifically for Circle,’ one which follows the ‘grain’ and ‘functional requirements,’ of all the spaces to be contained within the building.Most issues we come across on a project are due to missing services or undefined duties within the laboratory equipment list.. Labs without extracting equipment can follow the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) guidance for air change rates, with supplementary cooling required from internal units such as fan coil units.

For spaces requiring close temperature control, we do not use refrigerant-to- air cooling..In labs with extracting equipment, especially fume cupboards, the make-up air required may be a very high volume and allow for centralised air cooling.

We always review the possibility of variable-volume fume cupboards to reduce the energy demand, whilst being aware that the stack discharge on fume cupboards must remain constant, which means the fans will require a bleed damper to allow make-up air to enter the fan to maintain constant efflux velocity.With any fume extracting system, we will ensure the material of construction throughout the entire system is suitable for the extracted fumes.