ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN


Arup was involved from the initial stages of the project in several areas – project management, mechanical, electrical, and public health engineering (MEP), fire engineering, and logistics. From the outset, it was critical that all teams worked together to balance the clients’ need for flexibility with the technical requirements of the scientists who would be based in the building.


Adaptability vs. technical requirements The Institute building is made up four quadrants, each with a number of floors dedicated to laboratories. In line with the requirement for collaboration, a large portion of the building is made up of open plan laboratory areas where groups of eight or nine scientists can experiment, with adjacent areas to write up their notes. As with the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, these laboratory modules needed to flex to meet different and shifting needs. The base building services infrastructure, and the way that services were distributed through risers, all needed to accommodate flexibility. To achieve this, we worked closely with the architect to simulate a range of scenarios whereby different laboratories were dropped into different areas of the floorplate. This enabled us to see where service provision could limit activity. This then fed into the creation of an adaptability strategy, which saw us work out a realistic provision of gas, water, ventilation, electrical, and IT distribution, to cover an agreed spectrum of science across the majority of the building. This has been documented to show the systems’ capacity if people want to make changes in the future.


High levels of ventilation


There are some areas of the building that have to be permanently designated. The high levels of ventilation required for chemistry, for example, mean that these facilities must remain on one floor. Similarly, some highly sensitive equipment used for advanced imaging needs to be kept in a constant environment where vibration can be mitigated. We undertook detailed traffic analysis and transportation network studies to work out the impact of these on equipment, and where in the building this would be least felt. Inertia bases have also been used to isolate equipment from the building.


Flexible boundaries


While areas can be re-configured within the Francis Crick Institute, the facility’s central London location means there is always a finite amount of space, and maximising this for scientific research necessitated a flexible approach to logistics. Liaising with facilities managers and Institute directors to work out how the spatial limitations of the building impacted working practices, and how this could be resolved, was an important element of our work. The solution was to establish a ‘just- in-time’ approach to consumables, and a consolidation centre off-site. This houses all equipment and supplies that do not need to be accessed often or quickly.


Maintaining flexibility


While the Crick is designed to adapt, undertaking adaptations demands the involvement of facilities management, logistics, and security teams. To ensure that they were comfortable with the systems and their limitations, we


developed a ‘soft-landing’ strategy whereby, as construction was completed, these teams came in to work alongside the contractor to bring the building services online. This period was critical, as it will enable these teams to adapt services to meet changing needs, while ensuring that doing so will not overstep important health and safety or functional boundaries.


Guy’s Cancer Centre


As a working medical treatment facility, you might think that the priorities governing the design of the Guy’s Cancer Centre in London (HEJ – June 2015) would be very different to those influencing a research laboratory. However, the focus on flexibility is just as strong. This is largely because of the speed of scientific discovery, which is fed directly into today’s medical treatments. Just as the brightest research brains are keen to be able to access to the latest technologies, medical professionals want to work in facilities where they can use the latest techniques and remain at the forefront of patient care, so much so that one floor is dedicated to a King’s Health Partners research laboratory. The Guy’s Cancer Centre has not been designed for frequent layout shifts – in a facility with patient comfort at its heart, this could be disorientating. Flexibility allows for the intermittent updating of floor uses so that the building remains at the cutting edge of cancer care, and the engineering design has been developed to cater for this. With experience such a key element in the design, simplicity of each patient’s journey was also a driving concern.


While conventionally high specification medical equipment such as ‘linac’ treatment and MRI, PET-MRI, and CT imaging machines would be housed at ground level or in the basement, the Guy’s design team wanted to make sure that patients could be treated locally to where they were being cared for. To achieve this, the new Cancer Centre is formed from a number of stacked ‘villages’, each relating to specific patient needs, with medical equipment located throughout the building.


A CGI image of the Guy’s Cancer Centre in south London. 44 Health Estate Journal April 2017


Moving beyond the conventional It is this arrangement that required us, as engineers, to move beyond the conventional approach. Linac treatment and MRI, PET-MRI, and CT imaging machines are heavy due to the machine weight and shielding, and can also require very stringent vibration control; this is most easily met at or below ground level. As an analogy, in a typical office building the design will often allow for eight times the vibration that could be perceived by occupants. The imaging areas at the Guy’s Cancer Centre have been designed to provide 25 times less vibration than this, using advanced


© Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners


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