The original brief was to refurbish an existing building. Our counsel was to knock it down and start again which is a confronting thing to tell a client, and required us to make the case clearly.

Our job is to be the expert in the room. We interrogate what it means to get the most out of a client’s budget and help them make clear minded decisions. For Arts West, the existing structure's floor-to-ceiling heights were too low for contemporary learning. The building had reached the end of its useful life. We fully costed the comparisons and advised that the price of a new building would be repaid with an innovative, creative and fun place to open people’s minds to the rich possibilities of an Arts education. The university agreed.

Object-based learning – using artefacts from the university's 23 extraordinarily wide-ranging cultural collections as the centre of the teaching experience – was already embedded in the curriculum but had nowhere adequate to happen. ARM designed two dedicated OBL laboratories that put the collection pieces front and centre, alongside a 150-seat lecture theatre and flexible teaching spaces configurable for 30, 60 or 120 students on a flat-floor modular grid that can adapt as pedagogies continue to change. The playful, richly decorative, wildly varied, digitally integrated display cabinets are refreshed each semester, inviting students and staff to discuss, collaborate, recharge, and linger well beyond the confines of traditional classrooms and timetables.

Too many university buildings are faculty-led: students attend, rather than inhabit. Arts West is filled with enticing and comfortable informal places for students to study together or individually, charge their devices, and learn before and after class as much as during it – while not in the brief, these spaces are intrinsic to the campus experience. Students consistently identify Arts West as one of the most popular places on campus for studying and socialising.

The facade is both a passive solar-control element and an architectural manifestation of the faculty’s pedagogical aspirations. The building has two skins: a glass wall behind a structure of parallel horizontal steel fins, into which images from the university's cultural collections are profile-cut. The fins do the environmental work; the images do the cultural work. Without even entering it, the building is teaching.