Date: 27 May 09
Author: Caroline Ednie, Web Editor
Email this Article
| Click to Print
This competition winning, new-build cancer research facility for the University of Glasgow and Cancer Research UK immediately followed Reiach and Hall's nationally acclaimed, award winning Wolfson Medical School, also for the University of Glasgow.
This major research laboratory building accommodates a directorate, seminar rooms, lecture theatre, social areas and laboratory with support spaces for 250 staff sited within the mature walled garden grounds of the University’s existing Garscube Estate research campus.
The client's brief clearly stated the intention to create a world-class research environment. The new building takes the form of the crystalline cube within a walled garden. The building is layered horizontally. The ground floor, containing lecture, meeting and café areas, opens up to the enclosed garden. Above a series of highly serviced laboratories rotate around a central communal area. The plan stresses the importance of areas where researchers can casually meet, converse and exchange ideas.
Working with the artist Alan Johnston, a solar screen frit was ‘drawn’ onto the glazed walls of the exterior. Achieving a BREEAM of very good, the new building - linked to the current Beatson Institute - was constructed whilst full occupation and use was maintained in the existing research facilities. This cutting-edge, glazed skin building is seen as a world-leader in terms of its open debate forum & research environment.
The building received the 2008 GIA Awards Supreme Medal winner and ‘Best Healthcare Building’, and Silver Roses Design Award ‘Best Public Building 2008’.
Professor Gerry Grams, GIA Chairman and Glasgow City Council’s City Design Advisor summed up the GIA judges comments:
“The building positively oozes ‘cool’ from the outside, and demands that you touch it inside – it is a ‘tour-de-force of skilful transparency allowing light deep into the plan. The judges congratulate the architects and their client in creating an ambitious and exacting work of beauty, which surely is now a benchmark building for others to follow. The client’s brief for the Beatson Cancer Facility was to create a world-class research environment, and notwithstanding some difficulties during the build, the architects have delivered a stunning building which is deceptively simplistic but technically highly complex.”
Beatson images: Copyright Paul Zanre Photography
Project: Cancer Research Facility for the Beatson Institute, University of Glasgow
Architect: Reiach and Hall Architects
Client: University of Glasgow and Cancer Research UK
Location: Glasgow
Contract value: £13 million
Link: www.reiachandhall.co.uk
Images: Paul Zanre
Be the first to comment on this article .
