The sculptural ribbed aluminium form of the EBI South Building in Cambridgeshire is a dynamic reflection of the pioneering bioinformatics research going on inside. Stephen Cousins reports.
Hunched down low in a protected rural landscape and clad in a ribbed aluminium and glass shell, the EBI South Building designed by Abell Nepp, does a stylish job of camouflaging its status as one of the most cutting edge research establishments on the planet.
The three storey, 4,900 sqm building, located in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, forms part of the Wellcome Trust’s Genome Campus, and provides research and training space for over 240 researchers working for the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s (EMBL) European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). The £17.8 million facility is home to the ELIXIR Project, the organisation tasked with coordinating bioinformatics activities throughout Europe and applying sophisticated Big Data data mining techniques to biodata.
One clue to the pioneering work going on inside the building is its dynamic ‘bullet’-shaped profile, formed by a semi-circular aluminium brise soleil on the south side and a flat angular aluminium and glass facade on the north side that leans out towards a central campus plaza. In addition, the entire building envelope is compressed concertina-like, into a series of triangular ribs that run across the facades and up and over the roof.
Bruce Nepp, director at Abell Nepp told ADF:
“A major concept was that from perimeters of the campus you would only see soft building forms, so we came up with the idea of creating a curved back to the building. The inclusion of louvres helps further soften this facade, while providing maximum levels of solar shading and daylight. The site can also be seen from neighbouring hills, so we had to be sensitive to this and ensure the roofscape was well designed.”
The South Building was funded through a UK Research Councils Large Facilities Capital Fund grant, led by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. The scheme completes the second phase of the Genome Campus’ South Field Development, begun in 2005, and encloses the final side of a large campus plaza, built during phase one. The building links to the Sanger Institute research laboratories (made famous for its leading contribution to the Human Genome Project) a datacentre and other campus amenities.
The scheme features a two-storey research block, including 36 research studios, accessed at plaza level. The site slopes away from this entrance towards the west, creating space for a single storey training centre embedded into the ground on the floor below. This includes a 150-seat lecture theatre, IT training rooms and a media studio.
A full-height atrium extends along the building’s central east-west axis, allowing natural daylight to penetrate down to a series of circular glass ‘pods’ on the top two floors, which function as project leader offices or small Skype/WebEx meeting rooms. Light also reaches down into a breakout space for the lecture theatre and training facilities on the lower ground floor.
The atrium posed an acoustical challenge and Abell Nepp had to balance the need for a lively industry space for training and lectures with the need for quiet studios on the upper floors where full time researchers are crunching data.
“It was a complex exercise balancing acoustic attenuation with open space and connection,” says Dan McArthur, project architect at Abell Nepp.
“It meant extensive use of perforated metal and ribbed cladding inside the atrium to help attenuate the noise.”
The research studios are each designed for use by up to eight people and feature closing doors, double-insulated glazing, metal perforated and wood panels with acoustic backing to increase sound control.
“As a result of these measures, the building is a pleasant internal environment with a bit of buzz, but not enough to become disruptive. The client was very happy with how it was resolved,” he adds.
Dotted around the atrium walkways are a series of “tea points” that offer views of the surrounding wetlands where researchers from different departments are encouraged to meet informally.
The scheme’s designers had to observe stringent planning requirements intended to minimise impacts on the nearby historic village of Ickleton and the surrounding conservation area.
Aligning the building along an east-west axis helped preserve views towards the wetlands – created by the Wellcome Trust earlier in the development – and the valley beyond, while minimising the building’s profile towards the village.
Partially embedding the building into the ground helped reduce its height, and installing the curved south-facing brise soleil helped soften the building’s mass when seen from the village, also optimising levels of solar shading and daylighting to the spaces within. Although the brise soleil effectively forms the south facade, it stands separate from the windows to provide high levels of solar shading.
“We worked closely with the structural engineer, Aecom, to ensure that the density and separation of the individual louvre blades was appropriate to part-shield the sun. When the sun is at its highest the fins are denser, providing a greater level of shade,” says McArthur.
“Although automatic internal blinds are still required to deal with low-level sunlight, when they are down the blades create a lovely pattern of shadows on the blinds and inside the space.”
The internal blinds are controlled by the BMS and automatically deploy at night to prevent light pollution towards the village as part of “Dark Skies Concepts” introduced by planning authorities.
The north elevation leans at an angle towards the plaza in an effort to prevent reflections and to amplify the connection between research studios located behind that elevation and the plaza below.
The roof was an important design feature, as it can be seen from the nearby hills, so the rigid concertina effect, seen on the north facade, was continued across it, also integrating a wide pitched atrium roof and solar photovoltaic arrays designed to provide over 10 per cent of the building’s power needs.
In actual use, the solar PV provides up to 26 per cent of the building’s power, claims Abell Nepp. The scheme achieved a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating and might have reached ‘Outstanding’ were it not for a requirement to include comfort cooling to allow users with different thermal comfort levels to be able to control their studio environment.
“EMBL-EBI is an EU organisation with researchers from Greece to Finland with different climates and therefore different comfort requirements, so we created a fully comfort controlled building with individual controls in all of the studios, plus the ability to naturally ventilate. That placed a burden in BREEAM rating, which we had to make up elsewhere,” says Bruce Nepp.
During the design stages, the South Building was involved in a research study, ‘Design for Future Climate Change’, by the Government’s Technology Strategy Board (now called Innovate UK). The study used predicted weather conditions for 2080 to assess the impact of future climatic conditions on the building. The risk assessment suggested that the design was resilient to climate change and that there were no high risks anticipated as many adaptive measures were already incorporated into the design.
The South Building is supported on a primary steel frame, based on a steel portal frame, which supports secondary curved steels used to support the south elevation’s curved brise soleil and steel out-rigging used to form the leaning north elevation.
“Geometrically there were lots of challenges for the designers and contractors to get the conflicting angles in the structure to work and the north and south elevations had to be set out to a very particular geometry,” says McArthur.
Design of all the anodised aluminium cladding was by Colorminium, with specialist subcontractor Bailey Facades fabricating the building’s curved and flat cladding panels and Schüco producing the curtain wall and the individual louvre blades on the south elevation. A Champagne coloured anodised aluminium was used for the majority of the exterior panelling and natural silver was used for the blades.
The choice of aluminium for the building was a logical one, its clean, crisp lines are befitting of a scientific research environment, and perforated aluminium panels and external cladding had been used on previous phases of the development. Another material continuity was the use of a flint plinth as a base for the building, which was also used under the Morgan Building on the other side of the plaza, and in the walled garden and other elements at the historic Old Hall at Hinxton, built in 1748. It’s another subtle device used to connect the building to its locality and the opposite of the sort of brash, iconic architecture that feels the need to shout about the grand scientific endeavours going on inside.