- Workplace & Office
European Space Agency Conference Centre
Designing a landmark conference facility for the European Space Agency to support collaboration and innovation at the Harwell Space Cluster
The Magali Vaissiere Conference Centre at Harwell Campus represents the European Space Agency’s commitment to providing a world-class venue for scientific exchange, industry collaboration and public engagement.
Key facts
Client: European Space Agency
Status: Complete
Location: Oxfordshire, Harwell
Services provided:
- Lead Designer
- Interior Design
- Landscape Design
- Architect
- Masterplanning
- BIM
- Technical Advisor
- Full Multi-disciplinary Team
About the project
We led the full architectural, interior, and multi design consultancy for this flagship facility, delivering a versatile, high-specification conference space tailored to ESA’s international profile and future-facing aspirations.
Located adjacent to ESA’s Roy Gibson Building, also designed by our practice, the new facility provides a 300-capacity conference hall, interpreters booths, seminar rooms, breakout areas, and a café with capacity to support simultaneous day to day usage and large-scale events.
The conference space is designed to be subdivided into three 100-person capacity seminar rooms to support both standalone and interconnected use, enabling everything from international summits to informal collaboration.
The building form – two interlocking blocks with rooftop plant concealed by louvres and screened from overlooking from the Roy Gibson by the form of the Conference Hall – was carefully shaped to reduce unnecessary external envelope and mass when viewed from the Ridgeline.
Building orientation and exact pitch of the conference hall roof were determined early to maximise PV output, reduce solar gain as well as providing shelter from the prevailing wind for the entrance Limited areas of glazing at low level on the south west elevations were positioned to capture low level winter sun into the heart of the deep plan break out space.
Continuation of the conference block form, provides space for 25 person seminar rooms capturing the north light with their own local refreshment station and amenities as well as an area for ‘piece to camera’ overlooking a double height exhibition and break out space.
All accommodation has been designed to be truly multi purpose from the sizing of interpreters booths suitable for use as 4 person meeting rooms all the way to window cills being purposefully deep and set at seat height to allow for break out seating and perch points built in.
Achieving BREEAM Excellent, the building also achieves the required high levels of acoustic performance and AV integration required for such a facility, and high space utilisation as a result of multi purpose rooms, integration of additional entrance ways, staircases and large format doors for zoning.
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