In 1959, when Jonas Salk was planning a research laboratory in La Jolla, California, he told the architect Louis I. Kahn that he wanted a building he would be proud to show Picasso. The building Kahn produced for the Salk Institute is one of the most beautiful structures in the United States—a pair of pavilions that face each other across a travertine courtyard overlooking the Pacific. The design emerged not only from Kahn’s aesthetic but also from Salk’s desire to give research scientists private, almost monastic solitude. Each senior scientist had a study set at an angle to the courtyard, so as to command a view of the sea, and slightly apart from that scientist’s laboratory, as if to suggest that the act of thinking is separate from the process of conducting scientific experiments.
That’s not usually the way science happens, though, and most research buildings now give pride of place to laboratories, where the real work gets done. Architecture also increasingly reflects the view that important breakthroughs come about not necessarily from the glorious isolation of hermit geniuses but often from collaboration and unexpected moments of cross-pollination. Lately, some eminent scientific institutions have commissioned buildings crafted with the specific intention of fostering interaction and connection, as a means of generating ideas. The Rockefeller University, on the East Side of Manhattan, has recently built a glass atrium between two older laboratory buildings, filled it with lounges, conference rooms, and places to eat, and named it the Collaborative Research Center. Columbia University has erected a fourteen-story tower for scientific research which will be occupied by a diverse mixture of chemists, physicists, biologists, neuroscientists, and engineers. At the University of California, San Francisco, there is a new center for stem-cell research that puts nearly three hundred scientists into one long, curving, split-level space.
Whereas art can look great in unusual spaces, an architect can’t decide that he’s going to make a wedge-shaped laboratory just because wedge shapes are his trademark. Scientists have very clear specifications for what they need: laboratory benches have to be a certain size and laid out in certain ways; equipment has to be accessible to everyone; some labs need powerful vents, while others need absolute protection from the tremors that rattle almost every building from time to time. It’s not easy to make a building exciting amid so many constraints, but all three of the new buildings I recently visited manage to satisfy a daunting list of functional demands and still have room for poetry.
Rafael Viñoly, who (together with SmithGroup) designed the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building, in San Francisco, is one of those architects whose work seems to have been conceived on the back of an envelope. There is almost always a single, bold gesture, usually a geometric shape that is the big idea around which everything is organized. You can imagine him sketching it for clients at a design presentation. Sometimes the buildings come off as a bit cartoonlike, but the best of them are more subtle than that—carefully detailed and skillfully integrated into their surroundings.
The stem-cell building sits on an eye-poppingly impossible site: a narrow strip of land on a steep gradient, with mediocre hospital buildings on one side and, on the other, the precipitous, forested ridge of Mt. Sutro. You wouldn’t think you could fit a building here at all, apart from perhaps the slenderest of towers. Viñoly’s solution was brilliantly audacious and unexpected. He slipped a long, ribbonlike building along the contours of the ridge, supporting it on cantilevered steel columns. It’s an industrial-sized building, yet it is perched in the landscape as delicately as a house in the Hollywood Hills. The mountainside is so steep that the building ends up being opposite the ninth floor of the hospital, and the only way in is via a bridge from the older building. In any other circumstance the absence of a traditional front door facing the street would be a problem, but security and privacy are so important to the program of stem-cell research that the scientists decided the lack of a visible entrance was an asset.
The building is covered in ordinary aluminum siding, but the exterior is enlivened by a system of ramps, walkways, and stairs, as well as by a series of wonderful rooftop gardens with spectacular views of the city. Inside, four large laboratories are set in sequence within the long curve, with common rooms and offices in between. Because of the angle of the slope, each lab complex is a half-story above its neighbor, a split-level arrangement that makes each section feel somewhat self-contained. All the labs face the wooded mountainside, with large windows and rustic views.
Like Viñoly, Rafael Moneo, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who designed the new science building at Columbia (along with the Moneo Brock Studio), faced huge challenges in the site that was picked. He had to shoehorn his building into the northwest corner of the Columbia campus, next to venerable buildings by McKim, Mead & White and on top of Columbia’s gymnasium. Building over the gym without dropping support columns through the middle of the basketball court was as much of an engineering challenge as building on the side of Mt. Sutro. Moneo, working with engineers from Arup, made the entire building a bridge over the gym, supported by a series of diagonal trusses that run straight across the building and are repeated at various other points in the façade. The façade is made up of windows and a panel-like arrangement of aluminum louvres, and it exuberantly expresses the underlying structural idea: the louvres run diagonally where they cover a truss and horizontally where they don’t. Since the engineering called for diagonal bracing only at certain places on the façade, the pattern appears random, but Moneo has exploited this unevenness with gusto. The result is at once coolly rational and wildly expressionistic, a modern structural element turned into ornament. It couldn’t be more different from the Renaissance-inspired McKim, Mead & White buildings beside it, but it shares something of their richness of texture, making the juxtaposition work.
If only Moneo had stopped there. His big idea comes off, but the rest of the exterior doesn’t. Using Columbia’s signature pink granite at the base of the building, Moneo made the odd decision to echo the diagonal ribbing, which only emphasizes how discordant the granite is with the rest of the design. At the corner, where there is a street entrance—an important move for Columbia, whose buildings tend to face inward, toward the campus, turning their backs on the city—a glass-enclosed second-floor café is cantilevered over the sidewalk. The café is, in itself, a lovely thing, but its placement makes the doorway feel so squeezed and mean that it undoes the welcoming gesture to the street.
The building’s laboratories themselves, which Columbia has only begun to occupy, are big, flexible spaces, many with skyline and river views, and with such high ceilings that there is space for a mezzanine level of offices and meeting rooms beside each lab. Many of the lab areas are big enough for two different scientific groups, another decision intended to encourage collaboration.
Across town at the Rockefeller University, the new science facility, by Mitchell/Giurgola Architects, exists for no other purpose than to bring researchers out of isolation. It’s an addendum, a voluptuous glass link, seven stories high, interposed between two preëxisting laboratory buildings, which have been gutted and completely renovated. For a small building, the design has enticing complexity. You enter what appears to be a modest lobby, and ahead of you the space opens up, Guggenheim-like, into an atrium whose floorplan is elliptical and whose side elevation is shaped like an hourglass—narrowing as you look up and then widening again toward the top. Lounges, conference rooms, and meeting spaces are on every level, and the atrium’s constantly shifting dimensions make some of them project into semi-public balconies, while others are smaller and private. The walls are coated in an exhilarating yellow Venetian plaster. Everything about this unusual building tells you that scientific research can be conducted in an environment of both zest and dignity.
There is perhaps a lurking irony in the fact that scientists, with all their love of hard data and sure proofs, are eager to let architects—as unempirical a bunch as one could hope to meet—shape a new kind of work environment for them. You can’t test architectural ideas the way you can test scientific ones, but it still seems a safe bet that the arrangement of a space helps shape the activities that take place in it. At Rockefeller you can’t reach any of the labs without going through the common space first. In San Francisco, lounges are set in between laboratories to encourage mixing. So many lab buildings are now designed with the goal of promoting collaboration that I’ve begun to think that scientists have become the architecture profession’s most optimistic clients. They believe that well-designed buildings can help them. ♦
