The lower floors house the collective amenities for the building’s scientific community. Meeting rooms, auditoria and breakout spaces are arranged around an arcade-like central space on the ground floor, with a café, science lounge and additional formal meeting spaces on the first floor. The seven upper floors are organised around a dense core of flexible lab spaces with naturally lit offices, write-up spaces, meeting and social spaces arranged around the perimeter. A generous hall at the head of the building forms a focus for the various working spaces and wide spiral stairs connect the laboratory floors at this end of the plan.

The large volume is uniformly clad in an outer skin of formed glass units, whose bowed surface and fine joints give the façades of the building a presence that is both monumental and fragile – a thin membrane, like the surfaces of industrial buildings from the early twentieth century. The even grid of the façade is only broken at ground level for the entrances; at first floor for the science lounge terraces; and on the end façade that is dramatically cut away like the prow of a ship, creating a covered space that lends a civic quality to the mass of the building.

Close