Meet the Team: Benjamin Newcomb

I've worked at Hawkins\Brown for over six years and have been working full time on this project since May 2017, back when we were looking to develop Queen Square House, prior to the Grays Inn Road site being acquired by UCL. 

As architects, our role changes depending upon the work stage. In the early stages, we do a lot of talking to people who use the building about their aspirations for the project; how they see the space working and the types and sizes of space they would need. The brief has evolved and changed a lot over the course of the project. We talked to university leadership and scientific users, as well as people in the local area who were involved in the project and statutory bodies that needed to be consulted.

We did a series of building visits to a variety of different labs to point out things that they liked, or worked well, as well as using their experiences as scientists of what has worked in previous buildings they had worked in. There are a lot of fantastic lab buildings around - the Francis Crick Institute is on our doorstep and Hawkins\Brown have projects across the country.

We developed early-stage concept designs - how the building looks and feels, how spaces relate to each other and then looked at materiality and the massing of the scheme. As architects we work from the inside-out, ensure that the building meets the needs of the users. We looked at how relationships between different spaces work - between lab and write up and open-plan social space. That generated some interesting conversations about the way buildings need to adapt and change or how a reconfigurable building could be beneficial to the evolving needs of science. 

This project is about organisational change and co-location is key. We’ve done as much as we can to make sure that the design can foster collaboration between clinical users, research scientists and patients, so everyone is under one roof. There's a real importance to getting people in the same space, to mingle and to break down physical or even organisational barriers.

Someone coming for an outpatient appointment or for an MRI scan is in the same building as people doing cutting-edge research. Our job is to make sure that those spaces can comfortably sit alongside each other and that we really understand everyone’s requirements.

One of the areas that I'm most excited about is the social landing space at the front of the building. It looks out onto the courtyard, which is going to be beautifully landscaped and over the refurbished Alexandra Wing. It connects all the different write-up spaces and offices and people can meet each other there at the tea point. It will be really nice to see that space, especially when it's flooded with light.

Personally, the thing that I have found fascinating about the project is understanding and synthesising everyone's overlapping, but different, needs and requirements. It's been wonderful to talk to a wide range of interesting people who are passionate and do incredibly important jobs. To go through this process and talk to all these exceptionally intelligent people has been enjoyable.

It will be an exceptionally hard-working research building.  This is what makes it such a fascinating project to work on and keeps me focused, after working on it for so long. There's never a dull moment! 

This building has got a bit of everything. We've got six MRIs, wet labs, a clinical outpatients department, existing buildings, a new build, a 12 metre deep, 3500sqm basement in central London. We’ve got extensive rooftop plant. We’re adjacent to listed buildings, we're on an existing site, with all that entails including extensive demolition and enabling work. We have surrounding neighbours, the Calthorpe project and Calthorpe estate to the rear. It's a very dense and complex building. 

Sustainability is hugely important and cuts through everything that we do. We look at the whole life cycle of the building, ensuring that the lifespan of the building and the science within it can go on as long as possible. There’s no reason why this building couldn't still be here in 100 years, functioning as a lab. The nature of scientific research is ever changing. The building meets the needs of researchers now and will hopefully meet the needs of the scientific research in the decades to come.