Description

The new head office of Rare Ltd., a well-known developer of computer games, embodies the dialectic in every game, between the game environment and the player’s options. While the environments remind one for the most part of worlds long gone, the player’s options are situated far in the future and are not yet realisable in today’s world. The development of a computer game takes two years as a rule, has computer capacity requirements surpassed only by the arms industry and is carried out in a complex mixture of teamwork and individual work needing careful coordination.

The facility, consisting of several interconnected buildings, is situated on a park-like site close to Birmingham. The main building accommodates the areas in joint use like the administration, the restaurant, hardware support and the sound studio as well as formal conference rooms; it also provides access control. The project teams are housed in four two-storey ‘barns’ that stick out like fingers from the main building, each connected to it by a glazed passageway. The ‘barns’ consist of rows of interlinked cells, each with two workplaces that are variously combined depending on the team configuration. The cells themselves can be divided so that a central gangway forms the dividing line between two private offices opposite each other. The access to individual team areas is usually restricted to the corresponding team members because of the high security in the game industry.

The holistic and ecological project approach begins with the inclusion of the site and ends at the individual workplace. Rainwater is collected in ponds and processed with the wastewater in a biological water treatment plant (reed bed or constructed wetland) and reused in the grey water circulation. A smart building management system coordinates the cooling, the ventilation and the lighting. The use of the thermal mass of the raw concrete ceilings and the solid dividing walls in conjunction with external solar protection means that in spite of the enormous cooling load generated by computers running round the clock, the cooling is principally managed by window ventilation. Next to the workplaces where the heat is generated, fan coil units operated with cold groundwater from bore holes provide additional cooling when necessary. Manor Park is an office building that makes people the focal point on a variety of levels and as a matter of course, which is something that does not jibe at all with the conventional expectations of a producer of high-tech computer games.

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Originally published in: Rainer Hascher, Simone Jeska, Birgit Klauck, Office Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2002.