We were asked to create proposals for a new public building for Leyland, which would form part of a wider regeneration scheme.

The BASE2 building (Business, Advice, Skills, Enterprise) will be a public building which enables the creation and support of small businesses, provides a venue for skills training, and which offers specialist facilities which support these goals.

A cafe and flexible spaces allow for events and activities which face the general public, drawing a wider range of people into the building and giving it life throughout the day.

A key briefing consideration was that the building should have activity and life throughout the day, changing uses and character at different times.

It should be an opening and welcoming building that any member of the public feels able to access.

The building’s different uses should encourage interaction between people who might not otherwise meet, and provide incidental meeting space and seating.

A compact form with accommodation around a central circulation space creates a lively, sociable, easily navigable building which has a clear hierarchy of more public to more private rising up through the floors. Multi use rooms on the ground floor allow for a variety of event setups.

Structural timber greatly reduces the building’s embodied carbon and creates a warm, humane interior. The proposed facade material, aluminium, is durable and has a long life. Formed into thin sheets of material, it is a materially efficient way of facing the building and will be highly recyclable at the building’s end of life.

High performance fabric and air tightness, a compact form, solar shading, openable windows to office spaces and MVHR to more densely populated spaces, and air source heat pumps reduce the building’s energy in use, while photovoltaics produce renewable energy on site. The viability of a masterplan-wide shared ground loop network connected ground source heat pumps will be assessed.

Red and natural aluminium fins refer to the distinctive two-tone buses for which Leyland is famous. Movement around the building will reveal different spacings and faces of the fins, which will combine to produce varying two-tone striped patterns.