Even better than the real thing

In East London’s Dagenham, UCL’s PEARL research lab can run the tape forwards on the real world by creating false ones.

 

The approach isn’t exactly prepossessing, but then approaches can be misleading. An east London road leads into an old school industrial estate underscored by ratchety, empty buildings, before fifty yards on and peeping out from a side road cul de sac is a rust-red exterior. Turn the corner with the building, now in view, its rust shackled, and jet black industrial shed façade is large and very long. By contrast the entrance, relegated to a side entrance, is arrestingly modest as is the immediate foyer area. Once through the foyer and then past inner doors, belying the cramped entrance, the interior opens into what feels like a vast steel hanger. Spacious doesn’t do the moment justice. At one-hundred metres long, forty metres wide, and ten metres high, its ground-level footprint is larger than Wembley Arena. From the entrance door, the far end feels just about visible. Welcome to PEARL’s very own Tardis effect.

Which is to say welcome to an entirely one-of-a-kind-building. PEARL, the sweetly shortened acronym from Person-Environment-Activity-Research-Laboratory, sits at the edge of east Dagenham backing onto the expansive Eastbrook Country Park. From outside nothing hints at the mystery ride in store.

As you become accustomed to its scale, the space’s unique features begin to make their presence felt. Everything, apart from the floor, is black. Sections are cordoned off for raised plinths, with steps for access. There are elevation platforms, and black curtains demarcating its different sections. Some distance away a green fork-lift stands immobile, the far side of the first curtain. Further black draped curtains run the side of the vast room. A row of ventilation units hang from the rafters, each ending with three eyed extractors poking out, kind of akin to horizontal funnels. Storage spaces can be gleaned behind the curtains. On the nearside is the oblique messaging, a single word – Groove. Up above, suspended from the forty metre wide steel frame structure, is a gridded rig of trusses integrated with an array of lighting, speakers, cameras, and sensors receding away.

What is this? What is going on? The obvious clue is that unwieldy acronym: Person-Environment-Activity-Research-Laboratory. PEARL is a research lab, one relatively modest node in the research arsenal of the corporate entity that is University College London, or UCL. It is one of the first buildings designed by Perkins & Will’s London architectural studio, (though begun as one of Penoyre & Prasad Architects last projects before they were swallowed up into the American architectural and design behemoth), and the first of a number of projects underway by the practice for UCL.

Perhaps all labs are unique, but PEARL is more unique than many – indeed the word lab undersells what is happening within the vastness of its four black hanger walls. Its singularity stems in part from the space and scale. Inside the four-thousand metre square, - 44, 000m³ in all - hangar, railway stations, high streets, airport foyers, and town squares can all be recreated. They are imitation urban spaces to rewind and rerun the tape and study as accurately and comprehensively as possible. They allow us to examine human behaviour and test how larger spatial designs work, or don’t. Some five-hundred volunteers can be accommodated for research experiments. In effect,
completely false worlds can be created, and then tweaked, and tweaked again and again. All in the service of lab research. As a
result of the heady advances in new media tech, those running experiments can control what happens inside the multidisciplinary big black box from space, colour, lighting, smell, through to visibility, touch, sound, observing, recording, analysing participants’ behaviour and perception. In a time of digitally enhanced brain science, fNIRS (functional Near INfraRed Spectroscopy), scanning tech, and body sensors, the team can wire participants and receive live brain activity data as the brain responds to the mocked-up built environments. As the founder and driving spirit of PEARL, professor Nick Tyler notes, it is rather more than a simple container: “It’s not a building, it’s a scientific instrument.”

There might not be microscopes or brightly coloured chemicals, but PEARL is a space where, as the literature has it: “life-sized environments can be created”. Investigators can observe behaviour under immersive and controlled conditions, the instrument-container enabling testing of people interacting with specific environments and other people. As a graphic complement to these claims, PEARL was, rather amazingly, to host a decommissioned 737 Boeing plumped down alongside old underground tube carriages on the triangular forecourt in front of the building. It was useful for publicity but hasn’t happened yet and instead cars use the forecourt space for parking. Still, it’s a striking and unique research environment, which has been up and running, now, for three years.

In the aftermath of PEARL’s 2022 hand over Tyler’s small team immediately began conducting large-scale behavioural experiments within the cavernous interior. A significant tranche of the research is transport, related from testing accessibility in shared spaces to how passengers use a Thameslink carriage. Or for that matter, developing a universal sound to alert road users of approaching e-scooters.

Tyler has been involved in such all-embracing immersive research since the early 2000s. With PEARL, he’s been given a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the most of a unique research possibility. Small and bespectacled, with a shock of wild white hair, Tyler looks every inch the popular archetype of an eccentric academic. As is the way with academics, he’s razor-sharp in his thinking, having honed critiques of the modern city for a quarter of a century.

“We’ve got a dysfunctional city, that isn’t working,” he says with casual passion. “We need to think where we put things in the city, like pedestrian-only districts, to really deal with the climate crisis.” PEARL, for Tyler and his colleagues, is a critical instrument to do just that.

He notes that through the last three years, they’ve created forty different street set ups within the hanger, from a whole street, to ‘a bit of things’ including half a park, a supermarket, and more. This is where the raised dais come in, flexible structures that can be assembled into platforms, pavements, and other pedestrian-type infrastructure, enabling changing the topography of the floorspace. All small-scale steps to improving the built environment. “We can make places where people want to be. Green softer surfaces and less damage to the environment.”

He cites a series of examples of declining orders of tech-sexiness. Working with Transport for London (TfL) on their AI programme one R&D experiment involved creating an alert sound for e-scooters that works with the human’s internal hearing-vision alert system so that it doesn’t have to be a(nother) loud noise in the urban environment. Given how many people use buses, there’s quite a focus on the humble bus stop, for instance exploring how the curb paving height connects to accessibility. Similarly, this relates to how a bus design works – or doesn’t – with roadside design, a recent instance being a ‘floating island bus stop’ recreated to assist research with the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association. Bus engine sound levels and their effect on passengers are tried and tested. There’s rail research too: up until recently part of a tube train carriage sat in the hanger helping mock-up commuters’ movements, the simulation this time aimed at studying the stress effects of being in a crowded train.

Tyler notes how our sensitivity to sound often precedes the visual. “Hearing is to tell the eyes of what to expect.” In terrible and traumatic experiences, eyes – the great dominators of the senses – can be tricked into misreading what’s happening, but sound perception is different, and our ears are considerably more difficult to fool. From observing such behavioural perception, all sorts of pragmatic research can follow, whether connected to air conditioning or thermal comfort and temperature scales in buses.

It isn’t only movement and mobility, of course, but instead wider place-making efforts, and other public spaces. “We need to think at that high level.” Jan Gehl gets a quick, admiring honourable namecheck, in the work to make London – and other cities – sane, safe, healthy, and enjoyable to live in. Delight in other words.

Partners are high-level corporate and, given PEARL is only three years old, are at different stages of development. They include Network Rail, the European Space Agency, Heathrow airport, HS2, Rail Safety Standards Board, various London Boroughs, and internationally hospitals in Japan, and the Korean Government Transport Research Institute as well as the English National Opera, and the English National Ballet.

UCL is inevitably the on-the-doorstep academic partner, with collaboration ongoing with the Department for Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering’s Centre for Transport Studies, which is fed the virtual pipeline of data emerging from the lab to inform the design of real urban systems.

There are also internal partnerships within UCL. One includes a health focus related to intensive care for vision and disability. There is a move towards less full-on care, however: “more care, less intensive” in Tyler’s shorthand, which is still intensive but more care-focused. There are, he notes, straying into Oliver Sacks territory, people with different sense perceptions and “also no perception.” Neuroscientists from UCL, along with other partners, run related lab experiments, wiring up volunteers to receive real-time data of the participant’s brain activity. They can know how the volunteers are reacting to a design experiment long before the volunteers.

Audio Visual (AV) technologies are two of PEARL’s key research building blocks providing the ability to simulate the sound and light of real and recreated immersive spaces. Lighting levels can be tweaked and played with, testing how low legal light requirements should safely be set. The range of a human eye may be remarkable, though PEARL is pretty much the only place on the planet where a full light spectrum from five-thousand-and-fifty lux to twenty-thousand lux can be created, and our eye systems observed and tested. “It is the only place on the planet”, says Tyler, “that has an open environment which can be lit to the full extent of the gamut of the human eye.” This isn’t just the lux levels needed for humans to see when, for instance, there are very low levels of light. Of course, people have a range of sense perceptions – and none in some – and these too can be simulated, a flick of a switch and the whole space completely blacks out.

So too are sound levels and sound pollution, though also potential for delightful acoustic environments, asking and getting feedback on the best levels of sound in a city street, for example, or other mocked-up spaces. Then, they play a train coming through the building. It is an uncanny experience, hearing the train sound hurtling towards one, before passing and then, acoustically at least, rumbling and fading away, the sound of Brownian motion rippling back from the container’s distant far end. All sorts of experiments follow from this, designing train warning horn sounds to optimising waiting rooms. Oncoming high-speed trains may be dramatic, but the spectrum of sounds that can arrive at the flick of a switch isn’t really limited. A forest’s sonic world, including birdsong, wind and falling tree limbs are all possible. Indeed, recordings brought or sent into PEARL can, with AV doubling as a sort of recording studio, be stripped down, reworked, and integrated into other recorded traces, and then positioned within the 3D space that is PEARL.

A L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound installation provides the backbone of the audio technology with over one-hundred-and-fifty L-Acoustics loudspeakers embedded within PEARL’s box of tricks. The acoustic array runs much of the length and height of the building. There are two spatial audio systems, the first in the main space, and the second, the Sound Lab, in a small anteroom at the far end of the Groove building. Each was developed with and provided by L-Acoustics partners, Adlib.

L-Acoustics audio illustrates the crossover between academic research and the entertainment industry, underscored further by the AV technical team having been recruited primarily from theatre. For instance, the sound technician was head of sound at RADA Technical elements, both making and production, owe much to theatre. Also evident is how PEARL’s AV wizardry is but one tributary in the expansion of sound technologies development.

Back in the early days of mainstream computing, sound sensors were a popular source of spatial experiments for sound artists. In 1996 John Wynne working with Copenhagen’s Sound Gallery, wired the City Hall square with sensors so that people’s movements crossing the square would shape the music – Further FDR2/3’s Buildings and Sound feature. Or similarly
time Stockhausen assistant, Rolf Gehlhaar’s SOUND=SPACE; rooms rigged with movement-sensitive sensors for people to move within and make their own soundscapes. Thirty-something years on from these 90s avant-sound world experiments PEARL illustrates just how far these sound sensor tech integrations have come: that today they are but one constellation in the much broader suite of sonic tech that can be brought to bear on research, rather than avant-musical ends. PEARL’s built environment peers are the likes of New York’s National Sawdust, a Brooklyn performance space with similar immersive tech to move and play with sound across its space. There is also the recently opened Klanghaus in Toggenburg, Switzerland, designed and built like an instrument (originally a violin) and enabling one to step inside, and make music within an instrument-space.

But PEARL’s bag of tricks isn’t limited to sound and vision. Scent and smell can be introduced into the environment. Colour and temperature too, can be modulated and manipulated. Cold – or hot - air can be pumped across people’s faces (as can impressions of cold air which is actually low frequency sound pulses) playing with what our kind finds
liveable with, and what it doesn’t.

These sorts of features make PEARL a one-off, as a building type, though also a rare instance of where art and science, what was once called the two cultures, are housed under a single roof.

Acknowledging this, Tyler and his PEARL colleagues have launched an Art-Science programme, exploring the territory which is neither art nor science but both in some measure or another. "Science looks at the past to understand the present; Engineering looks at that science and applies it in the present to enable the future; the Arts look at the present to create many futures The fusion of past-present-future is how we perceive the world and is central to how PEARL sets out how to understand how we do that.” Once properly up and running, Tyler promises a gamut of "multisensorial art exhibitions, music performance, and working with artists to create multisensorial creative spaces."

Where exactly architecture is on this two-culture spectrum split depends on the architect, you ask. At PEARL both strands are present even as neither are explicitly spoken of. In other language terms like pragmatism, consensus, and simplicity are the watchwords on lead architect Ian Goodfellow’s lips. He notes how their big shed was designed as simply as possible. Initially, Goodfellow and his team envisioned that the gantry acoustic and lighting systems would need hydraulic platforms. Their weight – a full ton – entailed initial carbon-costly piling of groundworks.
But as it became clear that Tyler’s requirements could be met a set of fork
lifts and MEWPS, the groundworks became unnecessary and fell away from the design. This allowed the forty metre wide-span portal frame, wrapped around a high-performance fabric to be introduced, bringing efficiencies, driving down the carbon footprint, and enabling the university’s desire for disassembly to be realised.

The straight forward design extends to the servicing, which allows easy access if needed for replacements. The net zero carbon brief was helped by the shift to the steel portal frame, as well as mainstream green tech spec like air source heat pumps. While most of the building’s energy use comes from the lighting, compensated for by the extensive PV array across four thousand metres squared of the building’s roof, it appears to have easily attained what UCL wanted: a first net zero building, along with BREEAM Outstanding and an EPC A+ rating.

Externally, the decorative nine metre Corten steel panel façade covers PEARL’s front and near side walls, with a curving organic design stencilled into the panels, apparently inspired and intended to reflect the science of complexity found in nature of bird flocking and people flows. A second building, the Cave, was belatedly commissioned as the pandemic ripped in Britain after being tasked with immediate Covid-related research. It included an understanding of airflow through buildings, going up quickly during PEARL’s later construction stages. Once again, all black, the Cave complements the industrial language of its much larger next-door neighbour.

A second space inside PEARL is a timber box within the larger metal box, which has been dropped onto the far, western side of the hanger. This is the Groove, a space within the Space, for research and relaxation – and a clear counterpoint to the lab’s essentially sterile environment. Here research meetings, Zoom calls, and catching up on admin, can all happen. There are also community and collaborative spaces to complement a quite developed community programme. Natural light floods in through windows. Built from cross-laminated timber the open plan free-standing seven metre high Groove has been dropped into PEARL’s northwest corner, encompassing the foyer entrance area visitors need to pass through for the main hangar. If you look north, you see a tree lined hedge, and beyond, the edges of a nature reserve. Perhaps surprisingly are an earlier era PenoyrePrasad’s 1997 Eastbrookend Discovery Centre, a community and nature centre. The architects, it turns out, have form in Dagenham.

 

For Goodfellow PEARL is “a unique typology”, with theatres arguably the closest typological precedent/relative. To this end, the team visited a series of theatres including the National Theatre, refurbished in 2015 by HowarthTomkins, the Royal Opera House, and at Lancaster University, Sheppard Robson’s Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts. In total, the construction costs came in at £20 million, though this is dwarfed by the full fit out bill, a cool £50 million (£9 million of which came from the Government as part of a national research facility (the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC.)

If Goodfellow is an enthusiastic booster for PEARL, for Tyler it must feel like the culmination of his working life. Beginning life as a professional oboist, before switching to academia with a PhD on AI in the design of high-capacity bus systems and began working with pre-TFL London Transport in 1998. Early consultancy included research on making bus steps more easily accessible, spurred by mobility groups needing improved accessibility to buses. Tyler instituted the design of three different test bus stops, the results providing London’s transport czars with the necessary insights helping in moves towards universal access design across their bus and underground networks. From this work came PAMELA (Pedestrian Accessibility Movement Environment Laboratory.) PEARL’s predecessor, PAMELA, initiated in 2006, was hosted in a rather different part of the capital than Dagenham, North London’s leafy Tufnell Park, but contained similar if smaller versions of real-

world simulations, like a fully configurable pedestrian space. It was from this history that PEARL’s genesis was to develop. With PAMELA up and running, conversations envisaging the
next steps led to the east London site. Tyler first visited the Dagenham site in 2016, three years after the main employer, May & Baker, had closed doors, with four five thousand work force unemployed, making the whole industrial park ripe for regeneration projects.

Placing the project in Dagenham, rather than as part of UCL’s cluster of campuses close to Stratford, and its post-Olympic archi-fest landscape, is part of longer-term East London regeneration efforts. PEARL folds into a larger regen programme, anticipating the recently opened massive Eastbrook Film Studios – a stone’s throw across the industrial park. New housing blocks pepper Dagenham East Underground Station’s immediate surroundings, and other buildings are in the works. Beyond potential employment, out of town footfall and pounds spent, how all this major regen investment will feed through into the lives of local people is difficult to tell. Exactly how many locals across this neck of East London’s industrial woods will venture to take up the offer of using the one-off building is perhaps moot. Partnering with local Science, Tech, Engineering & Materials or STEM focused schools, including nearby Brook Academy & Sixth Form, has been developing. According to Tyler this collaboration is working well, while needing time to grow. Now, with the Eastbrook studios a neighbour, next steps are inevitable.

For Tyler larger visions are in play. He speaks of PEARL’s increasing relevance in a world where “perception of what is real and natural is going to change. Human beings are changing evolutionarily,” he continues, “including an expansion of inner-perception.” PEARL is a singular project, though also representing an essentially mainstream apprehension of reality: the mind is an organic machine and a data recoverable machine to boot. “A constantly reconfiguring and changing network” is the phrase Tyler brings to mind. It feels wired to a certain kind of future, of a piece with the Internet of Things, Smart Factories, self-driving EV’s and AI. Across much of the official world and media, this is the future. And yet, by dint of its relation to the senses, to perception, and by implication, to consciousness, PEARL is entangled with the mysteries of another edge – our fleshy, squishy kind and mind. PEARL is a powerful expression of one strand of a technological future: buildings as instruments, the play of vessels wired for interactive feedback. Even so, I couldn’t help feeling that rather than any end of the story it is but a beginning.