Sainsbury Laboratory.

Location

Cambridge, UK

Client

University of Cambridge

Architect

Stanton Williams

Project Value

£ 82 million

Floor Area

11,000 m²

Status

completed 2011

Expertise

Structures

The institute houses laboratories, a high-specification auditorium, meeting spaces, and a herbarium with Charles Darwin’s own plant and seed collection, all within a building set against the backdrop of John Henslow’s botanic garden.

Given its sensitive location, the key focus in the design was to achieve a natural look with high-quality cast concrete and natural hand-set stone. The building and landscape design help set the building into its surroundings by dropping the ground floor level by half a metre into the landscape, and all of the plant is housed within the basement, giving clean lines to the roof elevation.

Scientist connectivity within the building is a key design feature, where the ‘street’ at first floor level links the two identical sets of office and laboratory spaces and winds around the building, providing staff with directs sight to the garden around the building.

The application of exposed structure as architecture in a laboratory building is unique, and the services from the wet labs on first floor are intricately hidden behind acoustic baffles between the exposed concrete rib slabs that are magnificently expressed in the auditoria and meeting rooms on the ground floor. The building also houses a TEM suite, which was strategically positioned so it could be structurally and acoustically isolated from the surrounding building.

Apt, given its organic function, is the interdependent nature of the architecturally expressed structure. The ‘street’ slab and the roof, for example, mutually support one another, and temporary propping of these elements during construction required careful programming. The entirety of the structure comprised exposed, high-quality in-situ concrete, with no capacity for movement joints or thermal breaks. This has set new industry standards for visual concrete design, procurement and construction. The intricate detailing between the structural concrete and other finishes are second to none.

There was also flexibility in terms of structural floor typologies and a variety were discussed and implemented. Flat slabs were combined with rib slabs and encased waffle slabs, dependent on the span required and the deflection allowance.