Ros Diamond explores the Francis Crick Institute, by HOK and PLP Architecture

Ph: Nick Guttridge

Words
Ros Diamond
Photos
Nick Guttridge, Paul Grundy

In the past 10 years the derelict goods yards north of King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations have been redeveloped into a new urban quarter, alongside the renovation of both termini. St Pancras was extended to house Eurostar, and now incorporates a shopping arcade under Barlow and Gilbert Scott’s building, and an extended train shed whose entrances open transverse connections to the previously fractured surrounding areas. Its west entrance now faces the Francis Crick Institute, a vast building on a disused coalyard north of the British Library.

A collaboration by the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and three colleges of the University of London – UCL, King’s and Imperial – ‘The Crick’ is Europe’s largest biomedical research facility, working to understand and develop treatments for illnesses including cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

Given the contrasting scales of the adjacent residential area of Somers Town and Euston Road’s three railway stations and large office blocks for institutions such as the Wellcome Trust, this was always going to be a difficult site to develop. Local residents raised many objections, promoting low-cost housing over what they saw as another over-scaled and inaccessible development.

Ph: Nick Guttridge

The Crick was designed by two practices: HOK was appointed for its laboratory expertise, with PLP Architecture subsequently introduced to work on the building’s form and facades as the project’s physical impact was interrogated by the planners, the client and conservation bodies. Occupying a 170-metre-long plot, its elephantine size is comparable to that of the British Library, or to a small railway station or shopping mall, presenting similar architectural challenges.

Functional demands and height restrictions meant that the 1.5-hectare site had to be packed, with some of the Crick’s support facilities removed. In order to accommodate 1250 scientists in heavily serviced laboratory space, along with 250 operational staff, four floors are underground (including two of services). This amounts to one third of the building. Eight floors are above ground, of which another two house plant, under a three- to four-storey-high, curving louvred roof. The building’s architectural dilemma was how it could simultaneously be a symbol for an institution of international importance and contextualised with its neighbours, particularly to the north where its longest facade overlooks housing blocks and a park on Brill Place.

Ph: Paul Grundy

The Crick’s size is driven by the value of having many scientific groups of different disciplines in close proximity. Laboratories are arranged in four blocks around a nearly 50-metre-high cruciform atrium, with a full-length north-south ‘nave’ bifurcated by short ‘transept’ arms, with administration desks at the junctions on the upper floors. The main entrance is at the atrium’s wider east end. The layout derives from a spatial model developed in the design of scientific facilities over the past 15 years, which has been found to generate successful research conditions by serving laboratories’ functional needs while encouraging cross-fertilisation and collaboration.

The value of the lunch or tea room has been frequently identified in highly successful institutes, notably the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, which has produced 13 Nobel laureates – including Francis Crick and James Watson. The typical requirements are for a comfortable, functionally effective working environment with thinking (write-up) and meeting areas, and the sort of break-out spaces that are beloved by creative and IT industries, but equally important to research scientists.

Ph: Paul Grundy

For an institute to become an interactive community it needs high internal visibility, with staff able to see what others are doing. A number of recent laboratory buildings have showed how their architecture can meet functional requirements and create the conditions encouraging random encounter. One of the most successful is Hawkins Brown’s biochemistry building in Oxford (2008), which has a central atrium with open stairs and open write-up zones around it, with sealed glazed laboratories and a second access corridor route around the building’s perimeter. It is, however, just one seventh of the size of the Crick, so the challenge for HOK was to make a similar configuration work at a much larger scale.

At the Francis Crick Institute, each wing is sufficiently deep to accommodate a pair of laboratories, which share centralised equipment rooms. Their glazed write-up spaces are positioned alongside the main circulation routes, ringing the atrium or around the building’s perimeter. At a local level this seems to be working well – different kinds of informal shared spaces are vigorously inhabited, and impromptu encounters can be seen taking place – but it is much too early to try to quantify the benefit this brings to the institute overall.

Ph: Paul Grundy

Internally, the architecture is clearest and most elegantly expressed in the main atrium and the laboratory blocks above ground-floor level, where the detailing is slim and precise with elegantly cantilevered access balconies, and a crisp distinction between the laboratories and the curtain walling on the perimeter. Services local to the laboratories are neatly concealed above raking soffits. The atrium’s glazed roof and extensive curtain walling give rich, deeply penetrating daylight, and views across the atrium and outward in all directions make the huge building intelligible. One of the main concerns of the atrium form was that it would be noisy, but this seems to have been effectively controlled by glazing the write-up areas, installing tall glass balustrades, and locating break-out spaces away from the laboratories.

Ph: Paul Grundy

Unfortunately, although the Crick has a substantial public engagement agenda, implying a need for its work to be visible as well as protected, little of the laboratory life is evident from public areas such as the gallery or the curvy auditorium that projects into the entrance foyer. The dual level entrance, separating staff from visitors, is a strange device to resolve the site’s level difference, particularly when experienced within the massive architectural entrance gesture of splitting the terracotta blocks. Externally, only the restaurant, the gallery, and a school laboratory are revealed at street level on Brill Place, where varied elevational treatments attempt to humanise the very long facade. One of the major architectural challenges was to reduce the building’s apparently overbearing scale and to adjust its architecture in response to the most significant adjacent buildings, which were designed in eras of less collective sensitivity. But if the exterior has succumbed to the pressures of its context, internally the The Crick’s form attests to its heroic ambition.

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