Manresa House by OMI: Renewal fit for the future

Manresa House in Harborne, Birmingham, is not a monastery, so the people in it are not monks. It is not a seminary either, as it does not train men for the Roman Catholic priesthood. It is a novitiate for the Society of Jesus, usually known as Jesuits. A novitiate is essentially a training centre for those entering a religious order, known as novices. Whereas the monastic life is self-contained, the Jesuits are an evangelising missionary order, out in the world, often engaged in pastoral care of one kind or another.  The present Pope, Francis, is the first to be a Jesuit. Nonetheless, since there is a small permanent community of senior clerics at Manresa House as well as rooms (don’t call them cells) for the ever-changing roster of novices and for guests, and since it has its own chapel, communal dining room (not called a refectory) and gardens which the novices tend, there is something of a quietly monastic air about the place. Other closely related typologies impinge: the almshouse, the college quad or court. The novices are students of a kind, their rooms are essentially student rooms, the senior clerics are teachers and mentors. 

The brief to Salford-based OMI Architects, which has a track record in religious buildings along with much else from housing to cultural centres and community buildings, was to rebuild the existing novitiate. It had expanded piecemeal over the decades from its original base in a repurposed Victorian villa. So this was to be a fresh start. The society moved out during the works which included a thorough interior remodelling of the old villa as the centrepiece of a new U-shaped composition of side and rear wings. It marks a re-commitment to its Birmingham base, which was by no means a given at first: other options, including selling this large site and moving to Dublin, had been considered.

Keeping the old, unlisted, villa as centrepiece to the composition had cost implications: it meant that the whole project attracted VAT whereas had it been demolished and an entirely new complex of the same size built, it would not have. That’s the inequity of our buildings taxation system, which actively works against adaptation and extension. But the Society, according to the novitiate’s director Father Simon Bishop, saw great value in the continuity aspect of its familiar front door. 

Moreover, they were mindful of the 2015 encyclical by Pope Francis, ‘Care for our Common Land’ concerning ecological sustainability, in which ‘our sister, Mother Earth’ takes on an almost Gaian character as a living being. The project was therefore designed both to preserve and upgrade the original building, for long life and for low energy in use. Considerable use is made of ground-source heat pump boreholes and rooftop photovoltaics along with a high-performance and robust building fabric. Total annual generation capacity of these renewables is 23,850 kWh. 

Harborne retains much of its Victorian suburban character, although the survival of such a large garden around a single villa is less common. Project director Philip Etchells says that when planning the building footprint here, the symmetry of the old house led naturally to the symmetrical plan with a formal garden contained within the wings and more informal garden areas beyond.  Within this plan there is not symmetry of form – accommodation needs dictated that one of the rear wings should be two-storey, and one single-storey and shorter – though there are similarities in design and materials (brick in two colours, pale stone trimmings, zinc, sparing use of timber and terracotta, glazed ceramic – perhaps rather too many materials).  

Meanwhile the chapel, previously invisible on the old house’s upper floor, is now very identifiable from the street, forming the northern end of the main range, expressed differently in both form and materials from the rest of the complex.

The two levels of senior clerics’ rooms in the north wing, three rooms per floor, are framed architecturally in brick on the courtyard side to suggest a ‘house’. The rest of this wing is taken up with 12 slightly smaller novices’ rooms. On the ground floor at the end is a common living room with a fireplace, which allowed for an architectural endpiece in the form of a chimney. The shorter and lower south wing contains six guest bedrooms. 

The corridors in the wings are well handled, the inner walls featuring insets for pairs of room doors to avoid visual monotony. Although the corridors are partly double-loaded because shared shower rooms/toilets are placed on the outer edges, these are not continuous, with gaps left to provide visual contact through to the gardens on that side. The rooms are designed to have ensuite shower rooms fitted later if desired.

From an energy usage point of view, you don’t want to heat rooms or water in areas which are often likely to be empty as their inhabitants come and go: so there are individually operated ceiling electric radiant heating panels in those rooms, and localised hot water generation to keep pipe runs short and heat loss to a minimum. Similarly, the building form is designed for natural ventilation throughout, including the chapel.

This, oval in form with a small vestry placed behind it, is better inside than out. Outside, its bull-nosed end incorporates the east window. The liturgical importance of its orientation is emphasised by an uptilted roof, distinguished by its upper cladding of glazed pinkish ceramic tiles. These create facets which admittedly glitter but I kept wanting the curve to be smooth, along with the zinc roof coping above. Inside, however, this is a beautiful bright partly timber-lined space, acoustically well damped, adaptable for a few people or many. Its oval form is broken by a tiny side chapel projecting from its north side, a place for more concentrated contemplation or prayer. 

The chapel interior has kept something of the domestic character of its predecessor, with the clients insisting on pale carpet rather than the stone floor originally envisaged by the architects, on the very reasonable grounds that they don’t want the noise of chairs or people’s feet scraping.

Between chapel and old house is the ‘knuckle’ of the meeting room wing, balanced on the far side by the dining room, a full-height space to the underside of the pitched roof with high-level clerestory glazing. It has something of a churchy quality itself. There is no architectural equivalent of the actual chapel at the south end of this front range, which terminates modestly in the kitchen block. Meanwhile the old house, now confidently refurbished with repositioned stairs to allow more daylight from above, contains a large library/informal meeting room overlooking the garden, with offices above.

Externally, the new buildings, of conventional load-bearing masonry, exude an air of toughness rather than delicacy.  This works well generally, though things get clumsy at the complex meeting of masses at the rear of the chapel which are too tightly packed. That corner visually needed more breathing space. 

Overall, though, this is a place well up to collegiate standards, with a good sequence of interiors especially. It will surprise no-one to learn that I’m not planning on joining the Jesuits, but those that do are well served here in a building designed for the long term with minimum environmental impact. 

IN NUMBERS

Total contract cost £0.9m
GIA cost per m² £3,255
GIA 1,505m²
Predicted on-site renewable energy generation 23,850 kWh/yr
Actual annual electricity usage 82.97 kWh/m²/yr
Predicted potable water use 100 litres/person/day
Stage 2+3 principles applied BREEAM Excellent
Traditional form of contract