Architecture students gain valuable industry insight

Students from BA (Hons) Architectural Design and Technology recently had the chance to gain valuable industry insight from Director of building consultancy at Avison Young, Paul Naish.

The talk covered an introduction to building engineering services and explored how they should be considered in the development of the building form/construction. In particular, the presentation showed students the need for service zones, spaces, and plant rooms to accommodate engineering services; together with a BSRIA tool to estimate plant space requirements.

Paul said of the lecture; “This was the second year that I have given the presentation and due to restrictions the form of the presentation over Zoom did limit interaction; however, some pertinent questions were raised by the students, who appreciated the need for early collaboration with a building services engineer to ensure adequate space and coordination of the engineering services with the building structure and fabric.”

Third-year student, Jack Dudley, shared; “This guest lecture about building engineering services was extremely helpful. Paul Naish delivered an informative and interactive lecture that directly fed into our ongoing projects, particularly the final major project. After this one lecture, I was able to confidently adjust my project to suit the regulations and needs explained by Paul. Overall, it was a very helpful and interesting experience which I will be able to use in future projects.”

Dr Monkiz Khasreen, Course Leader for BA (Hons) Architectural Design and Technology, said "Paul's input lecture is of high value to our course as it helps architectural designers to understand building services engineers' requirements in their designs. Such lectures combine theory with experience. It fits very well within our distinctive collaborations program between industry and academia to combine the best of both worlds and is highly appreciated by students"