This article was first published in the June 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
How do you design a building that promotes cross- disciplinary science? "You build one that's big enough," says Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute, due to open at the end of the year.
This biomedical research institute - the biggest in Europe - will welcome 1,250 researchers from six institutions to study cancer, neurodegenerative conditions and infectious diseases. With 1,553 rooms and a floor area of nearly 93,000m<sup>2</sup>, the challenge for the Crick isn't just to bring them under the same roof; it's how to make them work together. "The whole building is designed specifically to encourage people to interact," says Jim Smith, director of research.
To avoid the "silo effect", the Crick has no departments - instead, researchers from divergent fields have been allocated labs in what Nurse calls "gentle anarchy". (As a study progresses, scientists will be moved into different "interest groups".) Team leaders' offices are too small to hold big meetings - so these will take place in a collaboration space. The labs, each with rooms for tissue culturing, instruments and microscopes, are arranged to accommodate teams of up to a dozen scientists.
"We intentionally placed groups from different disciplines next to each other," says Nurse, 67. Although chemists' need for specialised equipment meant they had to be clustered.
On the Crick's ground floor, a 450-seat auditorium and exhibition space sit next to a cafeteria that holds 450 people. To achieve this, Nurse had to overrule Camden Council, which wanted staff from the facility to patronise local restaurants. "The canteen was crucial," Nurse explains. "Francis Crick, the biophysicist who revealed the genetic code in 1953, was an advocate of discussing scientific ideas over food and drink. He believed the best collaborative ideas arose during informal moments."
The room was designed to be just small enough to force scientists to sit together during lunch, rather than seek out solo tables. Developed by London-based architects HOK and PLP, the building, situated next to the British Library and the Alan Turing Institute in Euston, is arranged "like a chromosome", says Smith: four interconnected blocks covered by a vaulted roof, with three and a half floors of lab space. To help people get around, the Crick has its own way-finding app.
The Crick Institute's subterranean levels hold four storeys of animal-testing labs and rooms for imaging. One-metre-thick concrete walls with sonic sensors protect the basement's highly vibration-sensitive imaging equipment. The building's deep foundations were dug between a Thameslink station box and Camden Town's gas mains.
Created from the merger of the London Research Institute and the National Institute for Medical Research, the Crick was funded by scientific organisations (the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK) and universities (University College London, Imperial College London and King's College London), which between them invested £650 million.0
With its estimated annual budget of £130 million, some in the scientific community have expressed concern that the Crick's size makes it impractical. Nurse disagrees. "While the Crick is going to be one of the world's largest research institutes under a single roof, in terms of research groups it is about the size of one of the larger university departments," he says. "You don't hear people say that a university is too big to fail."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
