Profile

Biography

Alexi Marmot is Professor of Facility and Environment Management and Head of the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies. She is an internationally acknowledged expert in the design, management, and use of places for work and for learning. Educated in architecture and town planning, Alexi has spent the last thirty years exploring how people use space, how buildings operate in practice, and how to create buildings that really work for the organisations that inhabit them. During her time at UCL, Alexi has continued to draw on her applied professional knowledge to inform teaching and research in facility management.

As Director of her London-based consultancy firm, AMA Alexi Marmot Associates Limited, Alexi continues to have a successful professional career helping organisations shape their built assets to deliver corporate goals. With its impressive client list of public, private and charitable organisations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest grant-giving foundation, AMA provides an excellent base from which to forge industrial and academic links.

Recent appointments to UK government organisations, the Cabinet Office and Asset Skills Council, demonstrate the value placed on Alexi’s advice on the development of the facility management industry. She has been invited to join the Cabinet Office FM/Soft Landings group, part of the government’s Construction Strategy (2011/12); was invited to address the Government Property Unit as part of the efficiency review of property services (2011), and is on the FM Advisory Board of Asset Skills Council, the body charged with improving the skills of the UK workforce to boost productivity and competitiveness (since 2009). Alexi also played a part in the Foresight enquiry into Mental Capital and Wellbeing during 2008. She has been invited to the FM Advisory Group of the British Standards Institute (2011).

For three terms of three years Alexi has been an Enabler for CABE, advising on the design, management and operations of major public buildings across the UK, including several prize winning projects: Manchester Civil Justice Centre; Newcastle Public Library; Rivington Place, London. For CABE, Alexi has co-authored many publications to improve the quality of the UK built environment, and toured the country giving training seminars on CABE’s behalf to hundreds of clients of public sector buildings.

For EuroFM, the European association of practitioners and researchers in facility management, Alexi was invited to address the 2011 Research conference, and the 2009 Plenary of the annual conference outlining an agenda for the future development of the industry. She addressed the most recent IFMA International Facility Management Association annual World Workplace conference in Phoenix USA and has delivered refereed papers at earlier World Workplace conferences in 2009 and 2005. Alexi is currently on the organizing committee for a research conference in September 2012 to be held by the IFMA Foundation at Cornell University. She is a member of the BIFM Education special interest group, and has twice chaired special sessions in 2011 for Corenet, the corporate real estate network, on Temperature Wars: Balancing comfort, cost and carbon and been invited to speak at Ecobuild.

Research Summary

Alexi Marmot has been responsible for developing innovative methodologies to solve practical problems that face all organisations in using space efficiently and effectively to fulfil their mission. Her research-led approach to professional consultancy specialises in ‘evidence-based design’, development of methods, data gathering, analysis and interpretation of results for application to real-world problems. The WorkWare methodologies she has developed and refined over twenty years, gather quantitative and qualitative data on space utilisation, audit, attitudes and behaviour. Results are interpreted to assist strategic decisions by clients, evidence-based design, and change management for building users.

Alexi has co-authored the definitive book on office space planning in the USA, and another in the UK: Office space planning: Designing for tomorrow’s workplace (McGraw-Hill, 2000) and Understanding offices: What every manager needs to know about office buildings (Penguin, 1995).  Many of her publications are evidence-based guidance for the design and management of different facilities, researched for and published by government departments. They include path-breaking work on spaces for learning, that demonstrate how space can serve pedagogy, enhancing the student learning experience while using resources efficiently. Alexi is frequently asked to teach in the UK and internationally on educational spaces to inspire universities, colleges and schools to reinvent the way in which they work and teach.

Many of Alexi’s articles and lectures are for widely read professional journals and conferences attended by practitioners. This helps ensure that her research findings on issues such as new ways to design and manage the client-professional relationship, workplaces, universities and libraries, are widely discussed, can and have been applied by numerous organisations. She has recently conducted pilot research for the Technology Strategy Board in the Energy Efficient Whitehall project, 2011.

Alexi has been commissioned by many public bodies to research and write guides to improve facilities that affect the working and learning experiences of millions of people. Widely distributed in the UK and internationally, these publications form an impressive body of knowledge on several key themes:

- The invention of innovative environments for 21^st century learning, from nursery years through the college and university levels;

- Demystifying the process of creating buildings and masterplans, to help clients achieve the outcomes needed by their organisations;

- Innovative design for special building types.

Research outputs

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Research activities