Reading: UCEM moves to refurbished premises with BREEAM Excellent rating
The University College of Estate Management (UCEM), the leading provider of supported online learning for built-environment professionals, which for more than four decades has been at the University of Reading’s Whiteknights Campus, has relocated to a new town-centre site.
The new premises, christened Horizons, have been refurbished to the highest levels of sustainability, and have achieved a BREEAM Excellent rating. The refurbished three-storey 1980s building has secured one of the highest scores recorded under the dedicated scheme in the UK since it was introduced in 2014, and the highest in the education sector.
Ashley Wheaton, UCEM principal, said: “We saw the move as a significant milestone in our history, reflecting our independence as an academic institution with our own degree-awarding powers and progression to full university-college status. If we were going to include environmental sustainability in our core curriculum, then we had to ‘walk the walk’ in our own ethos and operations. We thus looked at BREEAM accreditation as a model for achieving our goals.”
The team handling the refurbishment included fit-out specialists Overbury, property programme managers Taurus, environmental consultants Hilson Moran, and BREEAM assessor and adviser Anna Scally at GVA Acuity.
Joe Croft, project manager at Overbury, said: “With a total area of 2,118 sq m, the project included new aspects such as direct recycling of waste from site back to manufacturer.”
The new building also features a host of up-to-date technologies such as refrigerant-flow air conditioning, photovoltaic panels, insulated cavity walls, time controlled LEDs and a raft of energy saving devices. There are new openable windows, water-saving bathrooms, cloud computing software which cuts down on computer usage and electric dead time, and even a communal outdoor decked seating area with planting to encourage biodiversity.
