BDP strips out additional finishes and focuses on beautiful concrete at Manchester Metropolitan’s new flagship building
The Dalton Building, BDP’s new science and engineering faculty for Manchester Metropolitan University, has been awarded North-West Building of the Year at the 2026 RIBA Awards. The seven-storey building is the largest on the MMU campus and acts as a southern gateway to the city centre on the busy Mancunian Way. “This isn't just a building for the university, it’s their front door, their civic presence to the city,” says Mike Riley, architect director at BDP. “It was also an opportunity to put science and engineering on show.”
The challenge was to design a building that was both an open, approachable landmark and a sanctuary shielding researchers and students from the harsh environment of the four-lane road – all while fulfilling the functional needs of four university departments. BDP has approached this as primarily a question of spatial organisation. The south elevation is set back from the road, behind a new green space.
This half of the building houses the laboratories, and is partly concealed behind opaque sections of zinc cladding. “We’ve limited the windows, which stops the accidental heat gains you would normally expect from a south-facing facade,” says Riley. “We’ve sealed the facade really tightly with high-performing fabric, which keeps the cool air in and the noise out. You can stand at eye level with monster trucks going past and you can't hear a thing.”
The northern half of the building, which faces the city centre across a landscaped square, is more transparent. The main entrance is a three-storey fully glazed plinth opening into a 14m-high atrium, while the four upper levels contain workspaces behind glazing and projecting vertical fins.
In general, the lower three floors of the building support undergraduate learning, while the upper “research box” brings together the academic offices and labs. However, BDP has tried to make everywhere feel open and connected. The entrance atrium winds through to another double-height space and on to a vertical void that slices through the “research box” on the lab side of the building. “You can always see into the workplace, you can see into the labs, you really get this sense that this is a thriving community of scientists,” says Riley. “As an undergraduate, you can look up and get glimpses through to the next step of your career.”
The spatial framework is underpinned by a concrete frame with a 9m x 9m grid. This proved to be the most adaptable size for the various research fields, which range from clean energy to cyber security. “Each department has a different kit of parts for their labs,” says Riley. “But we studied each of these and came up with a common module, which fits into the 9m x 9m grid. So if one research group gets bigger, they don't have to rip out and refurbish the lab next door – they can just repurpose it with minor tweaks to the module. The concrete frame also gave us clean, clear flat slabs for the services.”
Most of the structure is exposed, including the 650mm x 900mm columns that rise up to 18m through the atriums, and the soffits to the 350mm-deep slabs. This was partly as a way of moderating the internal temperature, says Riley: “We're trying to keep this building cool predominantly. There are a lot of people in it, and there are a lot of specialist processes that go on in it. The thermal mass of concrete absorbs the heat in summer and regulates the temperature really nicely.” Thermally active slabs have been installed in the north side of the building to turbocharge this effect: “It turns the soffit into a massive reverse radiator. It worked really well in the recent heatwave.”
BDP also argued for an exposed structure on cost and durability grounds. “The university sets aside a huge amount for ongoing maintenance – that’s a cost that just keeps racking up year on year. We said, if that’s a pressure on your budgets, let’s expose the concrete, let’s not have sacrificial finishes. And by taking out those less durable finishes, we now have a building that can be pretty heavily used by the students.”
The architects worked closely with the concrete contractor to ensure the quality of the as-struck finish. “We didn’t want to start off on the basis that we were going to cast the concrete and then do a lot of post-finishing work. So we used really high-quality formwork boards, really strong supports to prevent movement during the pour.”
Concretes with 30-50% GGBS were specified, lightening the tone, and phenolic-faced ply formwork chosen for its smooth, slightly shiny finish. The architects worked out the best way to configure the 2.4m boards within the 9m grids, while the concrete contractor rationalised the number and position of the bolt holes. A full-size mock-up was constructed, including a wall, slab and four columns.
This attention to detail continued into the pours. Reinforcement was assembled on site and cleaned to make sure it was free from debris and rust. New formwork boards were used in the most prominent visible areas, and then reused in back-of-house spaces. A recessed grout check was introduced at 4.8m intervals to stop grout loss and staining – this is expressed in the finished concrete as a groove that runs around the columns and walls, tying in to the joints in the wood cladding.
Most of the building design was carried out in 2018, when embodied carbon was still a fairly new part of the sustainability conversation. Even so, the building measured about 11,000kgCO2e/m3 against an industry benchmark of 14,000kgCO2e/m3 for non-domestic buildings – nearly halfway towards the RIBA target of 750kgCO2e/m3 by 2030. “Our next projects have built on this and made further improvements, so it shows a really nice trend,” says Riley. “And part of that was getting rid of all those finishes that we just didn't need.”