Bragg Building wins coveted Leeds Architecture Award
The Sir William Henry Bragg Building has earned another prize, claiming one of the top honours at the 2023 Leeds Architecture Awards (LAA).
The ceremony, which took place at the Howard Assembly in Leeds city centre, saw the Bragg triumph in the category for buildings that cost over £10 million, beating both 11 & 12 Wellington Place (tpbennett) – which claim to be the most sustainable office buildings in the UK – and Globe Point (Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios), a “flat iron” style office development in Leeds’ South Bank Temple neighbourhood.
The Bragg Building, which was designed by ADP Architects, is named after Sir William Henry Bragg, whose pioneering research at the University in the early 1900s won a Nobel prize and unlocked some of the biggest discoveries in modern science.
Its low-carbon, glass-and-steel construction is seven storeys high and includes high-tech teaching rooms and laboratories, as well as a hermetically sealed, negatively pressured, electrostatic environment designed so that vibrations from passing traffic do not interfere with the ultra-sensitive laboratory instruments. These include advanced electron microscope technology for investigating and fabricating new materials.
Winners at the Leeds Architecture Awards (L-R): Jon Roylance (ADP), Joe Morgan (ADP), David Oldroyd and Jerry Lee.
David Oldroyd, interim director of development at the University of Leeds, said: “The Bragg Building was designed and built with the University’s core strategic aims in mind and the challenge was to change the way people worked. We needed to encourage research collaboration and provide a welcoming, accessible and modern gateway into campus.
“Its layout enables closer interdisciplinary working and its specialised teaching spaces further establish the University as a world-leading research centre. It has proved very popular with students, and it is wonderful to see the beautiful café space being so well used by students and staff.”
The University missed out on another award at the LAA; the Newlyn Building, developed for the Leeds University Business School and the School of Law, competed in the “new buildings (up to £10 million in value)” category, but lost out to Maggie’s Yorkshire Centre at St James’s Hospital, which also went on to win the overall award on the night.
