Features

By Pamela Buxton

Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences will wear its heart on its (pink) sleeve when its £35m new building opens in a year or so. The striking pattern on its upper three storeys is derived from microscope images of laboratory cells. What could be more appropriate for a leading centre for drug and vaccine research and training?

Now on site, the building, designed by Sheppard Robson, is Strathclyde University’s first new-build in 10 years. It is part of a £250m investment that will unite various disciplines – the former departments of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Pharmacology & Physiology, Immun­­ology and Bioscience – on one site.

The institute is one of the university’s areas of excellence and the brief was for a striking design offering both undergraduate facilities and postgraduate research laboratories. ‘This building will fly the flag for the department and the university,’ says Fraser Bell, head of project management at Strathclyde. ‘It is a gateway to the city and also to the campus.’

When Sheppard Robson was appointed in 2005, it quickly realised that the site, on Cathedral Street on the edge of the city centre, offered an opportunity to define the entrance to the university from the nearby arterial route into Glasgow.

Fraser Rae, partner at Sheppard Robson’s new Glasgow office, says: ‘We’re trying to enliven the street and say “this is part of the campus”... It’s an area that historically was part of the urban grain of the city but over time there had been some modern development and the street pattern had been broken down. This project is about reinstating those edges and re-establishing the urban grain.’

The design team decided to put the undergraduate facilities on the first three levels to present a lively, transparent frontage to the street, while the postgraduate laboratories, which need to be more confidential, will be on the upper three floors. Rae anticipates that with its pink-patterned, canti­levered facade, the building will make quite an impact.

‘As you come along Cathedral Street you will be able to see into the building, to see activity. It’s a building in use, moving away from backwards-facing university teaching facilities to being more open – “here is who we are, here is what we are doing”,’ he says.

The project involved demolition of the nearby Todd Building and creation of a new facility that links to the adjacent Robertson Wing of the Arbuthnott Building.

The laboratory function of the new building had implications for its structural design. ‘We wanted a large span to accommodate a lab module, but we also wanted the floor to be rigid enough so that if you’re looking through a microscope, it’s not shaking every time a bus goes past on Cathedral Street,’ Rae says. The architects explored steel and precast concrete but in the end chose an in-situ concrete frame as the one most resistant to vibration.

For the facade, Rae wanted a random pattern that would make a statement about the building’s aspirations, and this led to the decision to base it on magnified images of cells. He would have liked to use glass but settled for pressed metal powder-coated panels. He hopes the pattern will help to break down the bulk of the 8000m2 building, which otherwise might have seemed top heavy. The activities on the lower levels should also help to animate it. As well as a ground-floor cafe, there will be a large, open, suspended staircase intended to encourage students to walk up to the first floor rather than take a lift. There will also be plenty of break-out areas, casual seating and milling-about space to foster staff and student interaction. ‘That gives some life to the building so that it’s a bit looser,’ Rae says.

The first and second floors will include a 160-capacity teaching laboratory, interactive write-up spaces, meeting rooms and seminar areas. Floors are likely to be colour-coded, but there’s only one shade for lab walls of course. White.

Above that, there will be general and specialised research laboratories, the latter positioned in the upper areas closer to air-handling facilities, designed by Sheppard Robson’s in-house laboratory experts to take account of special requirements regarding air-flow, cleanliness, security and safety in handling dangerous substances. Labs that don’t require daylight are positioned in the deep-plan while offices and other labs are on the perimeter. The planned sterile procedures laboratory, for handling and packaging drugs, is a facility provided in only two other UK universities.

‘The labs are fairly highly serviced, so it’s about coordinating these services and getting a building that functions properly and is a good environment for both undergraduates and scientists to work in,’ Rae says.

‘One tries not to compromise the aesthetics of the space to the technical requirements but at the same time, you can’t compromise the technical requirements to the aesthetics. We quite enjoy that conflict.’

At third- and fifth-floor level there will be links to adjacent buildings which make up the rest of the institute complex.

Sheppard Robson hopes to achieve a very good Breeam energy rating for its building – with laboratories it’s particularly difficult to get an excellent rating because of the servicing requirements – mostly through good practice rather than through more attention-grabbing features such as photovoltaics, wind turbines or biomass boilers. The architects had investigated using a ground source heat pump system but the land proved unsuitable for this.

One of the first projects designed by Sheppard Robson’s new Glasgow office, the institute is expected to complete in 2010/11. It will be followed by a spate of other new buildings including a sports and health facility across Cathedral Street, designed by Belfast architects Kennedy FitzGerald & Associates, a new Faculty of Education building designed by BDP and the Advanced Forming Research Centre building by Hypostyle Architects.