The School of Computing has been living quite happily in the Queen Mother Building for about three years now and I thought that it might be worth posting about.
First off, there are some drawbacks to the building when it comes to actually working in it.There are not enough meeting rooms, mainly because of the recent rapid expansion of the school body, and the shared research areas, such as the one that I live in, open directly onto corridors which can make it hard to concentrate (as a result I mostly work from home and come in only when I can't otherwise avoid it). We also have a coffee room that is regularly booked for private meetings and is not therefore always available to take a break in. There are also some terrible acoustics, with sound that carries through the heating ducts, too hot and bright in summer (on the south facing side), too dry atmosphere all year round (but mostly in winter), and a second floor balcony with stunning views across campus to the Tay which is kept locked because the catch on the door is crap and doesn't hold the door shut when it is windy.
My biggest bugbear though is the poor finish to some of the interior. Much of the fine joinery is just not up to scratch in my opinion, and I have noticed a number of places where holes were drilled into either the concrete or brickwork then nothing was mounted. One of my favourite instances are the three holes drilled in the wall in the main stair well which were obviously for the bannister but the bannister is actually fixed about four inches higher than where the holes were drilled.
There are long terms plans for a new floor which I think will be excellent. The extra space for work areas, machine rooms, and meeting rooms would be great and I have high hopes that my suggestion of a green roof will not just be considered but acted upon. I think the only thing holding us back from the third floor is funding so if anybody has a few million going spare that they could donate to the SoC then it would be sorely appreciated.
Perhaps now a little overshadowed by the new teaching block, both physically because the teaching block is huge, but also because it is no longer the newest building, the QMB as it is known still stands out and has pride of place at the center of the campus next to the new green campus space. The real lesson to learn from the QMB is that it takes time to learn to live and work in a building and I think that that process is ongoing. As we settle in we are refining the way that we use rooms and as people start to take ownership of their own work areas we are beginning to see a slightly more human softening of the otherwise fairly stark industrial design. Drawbacks aside, the building is visually stunning, an architectural triumph and a feature of the campus that Dundee as a whole should be proud of.
