McLaren Secures £100m LSE Passivhaus Refurbishment and Extension Project
The initiative is believed to be the largest Passivhaus scheme in the UK, scheduled to be completed in 2027.
The London School of Economics and Political Science has hired McLaren to perform a £100 million Passivhaus refurbishment and extension on one of its central London properties.
David Chipperfield Architects' design will convert and extend a 1950s building at 35 Lincoln's Inn Fields to house the Firoz Lalji Global Hub.
Around 60% of the original structure will be preserved, with the top three floors and roof plant enclosure to be destroyed.
These floors will be replaced with a cross-laminated timber addition that will increase the building's size from 9,856 to 11,848 square meters.
It is expected to be the UK's largest Passivhaus retrofit building.
The Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa will be housed in the building, together with the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics, Executive Education, and the Data Science Institute.
It has lecture halls and seminar rooms, breakout areas, ancillary offices, a dining area, an outside terrace, and a ground-floor café. LSE Agora, a multipurpose teaching and debating facility with 270 seats, will host high-profile discussions and broadcasts.
The brick building, located in the Strand Conservation Area between two listed buildings, will have its exterior refreshed using a lime-based, off-white wash brush.
McLaren Construction's managing director for London and South, Darren Gill, stated, "Retrofit techniques have advanced to the point where we can remodel 70-year-old buildings to create world-class spaces while minimizing both the embodied carbon in a construction project and the future operational carbon emissions."
"With the new LSE Agora, McLaren will be responsible for creating a space that will become an iconic symbol of London's open academic life around the world."
Buro Happold is the carbon consultant for the program, which is set to be completed in 2027.