With Arup: David Lewis, Andrew Moore, Julian Sutherland
The existing situation appears as a fairly undetermined terrain with no apparent order. Yet with closer observation this effect is constituted by an overlap and subsequent cancellation of several urbanist ideologies. There are traces of a Victorian bourgois suburban pattern offset by large scale state authority buildings. In the Seventies the area was organised through a linear infrastructural spine that consisting of a non-public street with a massive subterranian distribution channel running next to it. Both these structures are underused and their purpose of fostering extention towards the south has been defied with the preparation for new suburban housing there.
We developed a web made of local relationships that inform the new masterplan for the site in order to reestablish a genius loci from the ground up rather than placing one or several objects on a blank sheet of paper. In the same line we used the site's height difference of 14m as a generator of the building strategy.
Right from the start the main strategy evolved as a series of low linear buildings. In this way we avoid the construction of a solitaire in favor of a pattern that affiliates itself with the landscape. It provides for permeability and integration into the existing framework of flows whilst maximizing the impact of natural phenomena such as wind, weather and seasonal changes onto the highly controlled and artificial lab and research environment. It puts the outside world as constant reference and arena for the purpose of research in broader terms.
With the second phase the need for a central entrance- from which all spaces could be reached- was announced. Initially our concept was doing quite the opposite, decentralizing the different institutes as individual volumes, separated by corridors of landscape. However we did not start all over but performed a series of operations that moved the strands closer together, enabled them to connect and overlap. This was followed by weaving, folding and interlocking buildings and landscape ie. inside and outside into each other whilst retaining the necessary differentiation for public, semipublic and secure circuits.
