Skipton Building Society Atrium – North Yorkshire
Skipton Building Society
Skipton, North Yorkshire
Bowman Riley designed a spectacular double-height Atrium for Skipton Building Society; an imaginative reinterpretation of an underused outdoor courtyard surrounded by 13 new meeting rooms, hot desk/breakout zones and gallery zones. The programme also took in existing ground and first-floor corridors together with ancillary areas.
Bowman Riley has been working with Skipton Building Society for 17 years to support the rapid growth of their business to enable them to remain operating in their hometown of Skipton, crucial for jobs and the local economy.
The Society’s headquarters opened in 1991 with a £10 million 97,000 ft² extension designed by Bowman Riley in 2000 in a conservation area close to the town centre. Today, the building today provides office space for 2,000 staff.
In recent years, extra space was needed as a result of changes to office environments, working patterns, legislation and IT. The need for a greater provision of meeting, breakout and collaborative spaces was identified to create a dynamic environment.
Our team was faced with the challenge of finding additional space within the existing site. A number of locations were considered following assessment of the site; the best was the underused external courtyard within the centre of the building. This offered advantages over other parts of the site: including containment within the building’s footprint and no visual impact on the conservation area.
The courtyard was enclosed with a lightweight aluminium roof, raised above the existing roof line on a series of pre-fabricated long span exposed steel trusses that expressed the architectonic nature of the structure while expressing the double height volume of the space below. A clerestory band of high-level curtain wall glazing and a series of large roof lights allowed the continued entry of natural light while simultaneously providing an innovate solution to the natural ventilation strategy of the newly created Atrium.
The project was delivered ahead of the pre-planned launch significantly under the £2 million budget at £1.6 million.
In 2017, Skipton Building Society officially launched The Atrium. It has now been transformed into an indoor multi-functional space to promote staff collaboration and enhanced working practices.
Skipton Building Society’s Atrium was a finalist at the Mixology North 2017 awards.