The School of Digital Arts (SODA) is a new initiative for Manchester Metropolitan University: a purpose-built home for its existing digital-art and filmmaking programs as well as new courses in game and sound design. A narrow building that sits on what was once a road, the structure is clad in profiled aluminum. “With two darker buildings on either side, we thought of SODA as the cream in an Oreo,” says Steve Wilby, the project architect from Feilden Clegg Bradley (FCB), the firm behind this and other projects at Manchester Metropolitan University. SODA sits between the FCB’s dark anodized-aluminum-clad extension to the Manchester School of Art—completed in 2013 and shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize—to its immediate east and the graphite-hued brick-clad student union to the west, which they also designed, completed in 2014. These are the two “cookies” sandwiching the cream.

The university wanted the new facility to attract as many students as possible, while the staff of the school wanted their building to be visible to the city and to the creative industries that they themselves are engaged in. FCB devised a “light wall” or digital facade that would work toward this end, and also challenge the current students. The dynamic skin, formed from 19,800 full-color LEDs, is a learning tool—or blank canvas—that has been incorporated into the school’s creative curricula, with students already programming such content as a supersized game of Tetris. This not only reflects the spirit of the school but that of the city as well. Manchester is an innovative metropolis, known both for its industrial heritage and the low-fi experimentation of its self-starting music scene.