Cancer Institute Research Trust

Grimshaw/UCL Cancer Institute

The building opens up an often opaque and private area of study

The estate of University College London (UCL) - the founding college of the University of London - is extensive and remarkably diverse, sprawling over much of central Bloomsbury. There is everything from converted Georgian houses to Short and Associates' recent, extraordinary School of Slavonic Studies. It is, however, the enclosed quadrangle fronting on to Gower Street, with William Wilkins' imposing decastyle portico of the 1820's that provides the college with an impressive public image.

Facing the quadrangle on the western side of the street is Alfred Waterhouse's University College Hospital (UCH), completed in 1906, recently superseded by Llewellyn Davies's massive PFI-funded tower (2005) on Euston Road and converted into teaching space for the college. The spectacular terracotta-faced Cruciform Hospital building was completed by Waterhouse's son Paul, who went on to build the premises of the UCL medical school with his son, Michael, who in turn went on to work on further hospital buildings in the inter-war years.

The development of the new hospital provided the opportunity for a radical reassessment of UCH's property holdings. The demolition of Waterhouse's nurses' home on Huntley Street, described by Pevsner as 'dour and reticent' provided the site for Grimshaw's UCL Cancer Institute, named the Paul O'Gorman Building in memory of a child who died of leukaemia. The £35 million project was won by Grimshaw after competitive interviews in 2000. The building is currently being brought into use by the college, part of a development programme intended to attract top researchers and maintain UCL's position as one of the leading UK centres of medical research. It houses 350 scientists and contains 4,500m2 of laboratory space on five floors.

Although the site, backing on to Chenies Mews, falls within the Bloomsbury Conservation Area, the demolition of the unlisted nurses' home was refreshingly uncontroversial. Part of the brief was the refurbishment and integration into the project of an adjacent Grade II-listed block by Waterhouse on the corner of University Street. The budget for this part of the scheme was very modest, allowing for only a superficial makeover of the building. As Simon Moore, the Grimshaw associate running the project, explains, "Camden planners and English Heritage were keen to achieve a sympathetic conjunction between the listed building and the new insertion". The entrance to the new building has been located at the point where it adjoins the reinstated flank wall of the listed building, the gap being filled with a sheer glazed wall which reveals the strikingly engineered staircase - a typical Grimshaw tour de force which is, in visual terms, the focal point of the building.

Flanked by lifts, the stair is a highly economical structure with cast-steel treads cantilevered from a structural spine of precast concrete. Part of the return cornice of the listed building, torn off when the nurses' home was built, has been faithfully reinstated. One of the client's key aims was to procure a building with a sense of transparency and accessibility. As the Cancer Institute's director, Professor Chris Boshoff, explains, 'the building does something exciting by opening up an often opaque and private area of study.' Cancer, he insists, already kills more than one in four of the population and is a matter of intense public concern: he and his team want the public to be informed about their work. Maximum transparency for the glazed link is obtained by flat-laminated (not toughened) glass, secured with a system of clamps (rather than planar fixings) which, Moore admits, was inspired by the remarkable glazed facade on the low-rise wing of Seifert's Centre Point - a pioneering piece of glazing design in its day. Beyond the entrance area is a top-lit atrium, covered by an EFTE cushion roof, formed in the lightwell of the listed building. This serves as an interactive social space for those working in both buildings.

The raison d'etre of the building is, however, research. In line with current thinking on laboratory design, the actual laboratory spaces, enclosed and highly serviced, with mandatory full air-conditioning, are separated from the 'write-up' areas where the findings of research are analysed, discussed and recorded by researchers (who include senior figures in the field as well as postgraduate students). The laboratories are located in the central core of the building, with the write-up spaces facing west onto Huntley Street. The use of opaque fritting on the glass partitions dividing the two areas allows natural light to penetrate the laboratories. The write-up areas have timber floors, further underlining the division in function, and the use of timber acoustic panelling provides another element of warmth and texture. Service areas are set along the eastern elevation, facing Chenies Mews.

A bank of offices for senior academics forms a 'bookend' at the southern end of the block, spanning the Huntley Street entrance to the mews, with views from upper floors over much of the West End (tinted glazing is used on this elevation). The theme of openness extends to the provision of light and views for those working within the building - a contrast to the introspective character of many scientific research buildings. If the element of demolition involved in the scheme was relatively uncontentious, there was a desire to secure a building with some regard for context - Huntley Street contains, along with some grim hospital blocks (still in use but meriting replacement), a run of listed houses. The fixed terracotta louvres, which form a shading device on the street facade with its floor-to-ceiling glazing, clearly help to link the building visually to the listed Paul Waterhouse blocks and the old hospital building beyond, and give it a richly layered look. Terrocotta was, for Alfred Waterhouse, 'a new and exciting modern material'. It has once more become a fashionable material in recent years, popularised perhaps by its use in the work of Renzo Piano. Grimshaw uses it in a novel way: the louvre blades (permanently fixed in position on the basis of sunlight studies and creating a wave-like effect on the street facade) being threaded onto vertical stainless-steel tubes with rubber joints that allow the blades - each made up of seven separate sections - to flex under load without damage. The effect of the suspended louvre bank is to provide controlled daylight inside the building while still allowing view out. Individual control of fabric blinds gives users the ability to exclude the sun when necessary.

The plan of the building is highly repetitive on the first to fourth floors, providing a clear diagram for servicing the vertical stack of laboratories. Write-up areas are pushed out beyond the grid line of the structural steel frame using coffered precast-concrete slabs - the architect compares the arrangement to sliding drawers. The ground floor steps back to respect the street line. On the fifth floor of the building, the long office area on the western elevation is replaced by an open terrace which provides a break-out space. Given the complex technology demanded by its function, the building's services are neatly contained within a maximum of rooftop extrusions - a contrast to the unsightly clutter that sits on top of many of the older UCL and hospital building in the vicinity. Each stack of laboratories is serviced by its own air-banding unit at sixth-floor level. Grimshaw claims that elements of the building have been consciously generated by the imagery of biomedical research: 'Images of cells, wave patterns and chromosome permeate the forms of the building.' The terracotta louvres have a 'rhythm that can be read as a vertical 'bar code' configuration or genetic sequence image, but also reflect the waveform that is so significant to modern science'. Exposed concrete soffits are 'reflective of the mechanisms and cellular structures of biology:they are literally scooped out where the material serves no structural purpose'. Talk of this kind may please the client, but is superfluous to a critical analysis of a building which does not depend on a concealed referential language to achieve success.

Medical research can have an inherent drama, even a romance. The public awaits new discoveries that will prolong lives and reduce human suffering. That drama was expressed long ago in Louis Kahn's Richards Building in Philadelphia, with its strongly modelled composition of laboratories and service towers. In comparison, Grimshaw's Cancer Institute is a highly controlled and rational building, almost industrial in its ordered geometry and response to the Georgian street grid of Bloomsbury. With its clear expression of structure and careful integration of services, it is a building in the best Grimshaw tradition, and one where Grimshaw's concern for detail does not obscure the clarity of the diagram. In this it vividly suggests that medical research is not always dramatic - that it's more often a matter of exhaustive analysis and experiment than sudden flashes of inspiration.

Source: Kenneth Powell, in The Architects' Journal
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