Opinion and Case Study

Science and engineering research is essential for human culture as well as for finding the solutions to today’s social, technical, environmental and medical problems. With classroom education at large state universities under competitive pressure (e.g. from lower cost private providers taking advantage of modern information technology and from online learning) for the first time since its development in the 19^th century, the importance of student participation in research for their university education has become much greater. What distinguishes successful institutions is experience in dealing with new problems based on prior knowledge, requiring moderation and interpretation by expert colleagues, followed by creative calculation and experimentation. There is a demand for buildings which makes it possible to assemble the interdisciplinary and inter-generational teams needed to invent theories and perform experiments that are important both intellectually and practically.

In the example I discuss below, I will show how the development of such a building itself benefits immensely from an interdisciplinary approach involving the design team and end users.

I also believe that university buildings perform better when the academic users are engaged in their design and management, and are allowed to take some responsibility for ensuring their optimum operation and performance. Rather than a building project being run centrally by an estates department or a third-party developer, I believe projects benefit from direct relationships established between the design team and academic users, with facilitating project management. The end users, together with the design and construction team, should be given control, as long as the initial cost envelope is not breached.

The project below owes its unique success, including value for money, to an exceptional trust on the part of the University College London (UCL) administration at the time. In today’s English-speaking countries where public university administrators are much more anxious to exert central control than a decade-and-a-half ago, it is very unlikely that a similar project would be achieved with the same cost and performance.

If a substantial proportion of the earnings of academic departments is automatically diverted to university estates divisions, there needs to be accountability to deliver good building performance, and in a highly technical research building, maintenance of technical performance. Decisions taken on the development of the estate should take account of the potential development and expansion needs of academic departments.

The obvious solution is for the user clients themselves to be given more control over the funds they are earning (via overheads on research grants) for the occupation, maintenance and expansion of their laboratories. This means that if the estates divisions do not deliver cost-effective solutions, the funds can be used for external service providers. This will align estate management and development much more with the interests of the front-line workers of the universities. Such an approach is demonstrated by the success of the design and build phase of the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN), which was due to the full engagement of the prospective residents with the project whose costs they fully understood and over which they shared control.

Learning from the London Centre for Nanotechnology

Scheme designs for London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN, completed 2006; Figures 3.1, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6), an interdisciplinary academic research facility at the heart of the UCL campus in London, and PARK INNOVAARE (PiA, design 2016; Figures 3.2 and 3.3), a public/private partnership near Zürich, Switzerland. The Swiss scheme will provide space for government and corporate research laboratories operating at the interfaces between technical fields. It employs a similar strategy to that developed at LCN: maximum cost-effectiveness and flexibility are achieved by a simple box-design with the highest value laboratories closest to ground level, a standard lab core/office perimeter layout for above-grade floors, and exploitation of stairwells(rendering for PiA in Figure 3.2, photograph of LCN in Figure 3.4) as social spaces. Figure 3.6 shows finished nanobiotechnology laboratory at LCN.

Figure 3.1 The London Centre for Nanotechnology

Figures 3.2 and 3.3: PARK INNOVAARE (PiA) Villigen: Staircase visualisation and cross section - Erne AG Holzbau / Hornberger Architekten AG 2016

Figures 3.4 and 3.5: London Centre for Nanotechology - staircase and cross section - Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios

Figure 3.6 LCN typical laboratory

The London Centre for Nanotechnology

The LCN was a small project at a rapidly growing university. It is an interdisciplinary research institute held jointly between UCL and Imperial College London. Nanotechnology is defined by the ability to design, measure and manipulate matter on the nanometre scale (0.000000001 metres, or roughly the amount that human fingernails grow in one second). The formation of the LCN entailed construction of an entirely new building on the Bloomsbury site of UCL, and renovation of space at the Imperial College campus in South Kensington. The first occupants of the new building would be existing staff from several UCL departments in the engineering, biomedical and physical science faculties.

The budget was provided by the Strategic Research Infrastructure Fund of the Wellcome Trust and the UK government, which was designed to revitalise UK university facilities largely during the first part of the last decade. By international standards, the monies (£13.9 million) and site size (400 sqm) for the UCL project were decidedly modest – peer research centres in Europe, Asia and the USA were being constructed with budgets typically in the US$ 50–150 million range.

The dense urban site is very close to the major and busy Euston Road and below- and above-ground rail lines, including stations characterised by strongly accelerating and decelerating trains. Therefore, the site seemed decidedly sub-optimal (especially given the modest funding) for a nanotechnology research institute which, by its nature, demands laboratories well-isolated from vibrations, electromagnetic noise and temperature fluctuations. However, the site also had positive features, deriving most notably from the embedding of the LCN in the fabric of a large urban university with particular excellence in biomedicine, which is a key application area for nanotechnology, and the unique multicultural metropolis that is London. On the strength of the latter, the then Provost and President, Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith, decided to proceed in spite of the significant technical risks.

The site and building envelope itself had been selected previously for a centre devoted to instrumentation for optical astronomy, with a planned occupancy of perhaps 40 people. It had only a single basement, and six levels at or above ground, encompassing considerable atrium space. When this project was rejected UCL, at the behest of academic staff, decided in 2000 to create a nanotechnology building with the same envelope and footprint. In the interests of efficiency, they employed the design team of the optics centre. Because of the radically different and more diverse scope of activities characteristic of nanotechnology, a complete redesign of the building was required. Given the need for laboratories with low levels of acoustic and electronmagnetic noise, Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects, who had visited a number of similar projects in the USA, and the Director-designate of the new centre made a case for a second basement. This was the most important decision in the early design phase, as the second basement is where the high-value LCN experiments are performed, notwithstanding the dense urban location.

The Brief

The design brief was simple – to house and promote the solution of important problems in fields from information technology to biomedicine using interdisciplinary teams from UCL working especially with partners from Imperial College. This brief encompassed both technical and social requirements. The former accounted for the demands of housing sophisticated nanofabrication and nanocharacterisation tools, while the latter arose from the need to create meaningful interactions between scientists from different disciplinary silos, generations and institutions.

The Process

The design process had to take into account the budget constraints as well as the interdisciplinary nature of the project. Key features were::

1. Design team appreciation of what the end users (scientists) wish to achieve using the new building.
2. End user appreciation of the challenges facing the design team.
3. Dedication to finding off-the-shelf solutions to all problems, ranging from the sourcing of staircases to the electrical shielding of laboratories.
4. Realisation that good designers share much common ground, as creative professionals, with scientists; a research institute is a professional partnership with many similarities to a good architecture practice.
5. Simply structured procedures for accommodating the different needs of disciplines under a single roof.
6. Direct discussions between end users and building designers, engineers and contractors, with minimal overheads in the form of intermediation by others.
7. A collegial and timely approach to value engineering between the project team responsible for delivery and the end users, focusing on practical solutions to deliver features necessary for building performance, even if costs seem to have escaped control.
8. Clear awareness on the part of both the design/construction team and the end users of costs, performance, schedule and the associated trade-offs, allowing, among other benefits, the maintenance of change order discipline.
9. Tracking of realised value and contingency spend (this project followed the USA pattern – not common for projects of this type in the UK – of including a substantial contingency budget) as simple project health metrics understandable by all stakeholders.

Execution consistent with points 1–9 implied a single point of contact on the client side, with dual reporting to the scientists and the UCL estates division, who worked together with a partner at FCB (who had the overall coordination as well as the design role) to arrange meetings and workshops, initially for identifying the project vision, and as the project evolved into ever more detail on technical specifications and execution.

The process of close engagement between the design/build team and the clients extended to the construction phase, during which joint value engineering kept the costs within budget on completion. It also allowed the timely detection of, and a well-calibrated response to, a major under-specification of the cooling needs in the building. It is difficult to imagine how any conventional approach relying on intermediaries would have outperformed our partnership among creative professionals in solving this major problem, identified only after construction was well under way.

Friday afternoons were generally reserved for visits to the construction site by the client, and permitted in-course inspections as well as the establishment of shared objectives between contractors and scientists.

Scheme Design

The key feature of the building is its division into two vibrationally isolated blocks: a stairwell and lab-office complex. The stairwell block also includes the lift serving all floors, restrooms, kitchen areas and furnished landings and functions, as the social spine of a building with a large height-to-width ratio. In addition to encouraging social interactions, its inviting nature, provided partially by its scale, light and specific items of visual interest, including alternating hardwood (furnished landings) and resin flooring, and a semi-transparent lift enclosure, also encourages preference for stair climbing over lift use, with associated health and energy benefits.

The lab-office block contains high-value laboratories and service areas in the two basement levels and ground floor, a 200 sqm clean room on level 1, standardised laboratory core/office perimeter layouts for levels 2, 3 and 4, and level 5 accommodating a server room and small cluster for supercomputing and a large open-plan office area uniting scientists and LCN administrative staff.

LCN: the clean room and associated service corridors occupies all available space on its level, and contains three fingers, with ascending levels of cleanliness and occupied by surface-processing apparatus, wet benches and characterisation tools. Between the latter two fingers, there is an electron beam ‘write room’ for the top-down creation of ultra small structures. A smaller clean room for an electron/ion beam microscope/fabrication tool was installed on level–2; this laboratory was later modified to host additional machines, including an electron/ion tool with a cryogenic stage for nanoneuroscience, and a scanning tunneling microscope for writing individual (dopant) atoms into silicon wafers, with the eventual purpose of building quantum computers.

For the specialist facilities, most notably the clean rooms, the chief client representative was strongly assisted by a clean room specialist, hired by UCL during the design/construction phase; the presence of this specialist on the client side was crucial for the success of the construction project.

Gas, water and compressed air lines and associated machinery, cabinets and scrubbers (gas reaction columns), as well as data lines and other utilities were all designed and delivered as part of the project. Considerable effort also went into the design of electrical distribution systems with appropriate reliability for their intended clients, and separate earths were provided for some laboratories. The clean rooms were also within the original project scope. Costs were controlled by insisting on a downward progression of laboratory performance specifications from high to low, ascending from level – 2 to 4.

Operations

Once a building has been designed and constructed, it must be maintained and modified for safe and efficient use. Accordingly, the project team, including the architects, engineers and end users, held extensive meetings with the relevant members of the UCL estates division during the design and construction phase. The need for scheduled maintenance, rather than relying on the principle of ‘fix it after it breaks’ was emphasised. After project completion, the chief client representative (the single point of contact described in ‘The Process’, above) during the design and construction phase became the LCN facilities manager, whose remit was to ensure proper functioning and evolution of the project for the end users. A role subsequently added was that of chief safety officer for the LCN. A particularly important duty for the facilities manager was to form the interface between the scientists and the UCL estates division concerning both maintenance and modifications. On his retirement, however, he was replaced by others who did not have his prior experience in the estates division or his deep understanding of the building. Preventive maintenance was not prioritised by UCL–a lapse which did not affect operations immediately, when the LCN and its components were still new and under warranty – but has more recently led to needless downtime. Furthermore, notwithstanding large overheads paid to UCL from LCN research income, an adversarial culture, with lost productivity, evolved from debates about liabilities due to inadequate maintenance, loss of documentation, and a lack of intellectual ownership of the sophisticated building.

The Outcome – Science, Technology and Training

Over the years since project completion in 2006, the building has a played an important role as a technical and social enabler for nanotechnology in London by providing state-of-the-art facilities in a setting optimised for the social interactions which are a prerequisite for interdisciplinary problem solving. The building – alongside the high calibre staff recruitment which it enabled – was a key tool for introducing to the non-biomedical faculties at UCL a culture of performing difficult, high-impact experiments at home. As desired, the net outcome has been high-impact science and engineering, and numerous successful alumni holding positions worldwide.

The underlying design philosophy of isolating noise at the source, the high-to-low floor hierarchy of lab specification and the use of simple offthe-shelf products for noise mitigation paid off in the form of scientific results fully competitive with those from more bespoke, expensive laboratories in more isolated locations. In addition, the building design, including open-plan offices on levels 2–5, has been flexible enough to allow the accommodation of approximately 50–60% more researchers than originally planned. Research laboratories have also been successfully modified, and the major problems are now overcrowding and inadequate maintenance (cleaning and cosmetic upkeep have been adequate) of what remains the most sophisticated building associated with the non-medical faculties of UCL.

Recently, a decision was made to construct an outdoor terrace platform in the vacant lot behind the LCN, which forecloses further expansion.

Figure 3.7 The London Centre for Nanotechnology: double height basement laboratory - with subsurface daylight window and built-in crane - for single atom manipulation and imaging