LabOratory: Speaking of Science and Its Architecture

1 Introduction: Cathedrals of Science

The laboratory building is as significant to the twenty-first century as the cathedral was to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Scientific knowledge has largely displaced theology and philosophical speculation as a framework for understanding life and the universe.¹ The privileged status of science in knowledge formation is reflected in campaigns by universities, governments, corporations, and developers to construct scientific research buildings and precincts. In this book we focus on the architecture of biosciences research. The biosciences are concerned with the biological aspects of living organisms, with life itself. Of all the collective human projects aimed at new knowledge, it is this field whose discoveries seem to bear most intensely on our lives and the future of our planet.

Yet it would be naïve to think that investment in this area is driven by curiosity and altruism alone, for biosciences research is inseparable from its application in biotechnology—including the pharmaceutical industries. In 2017, the revenue of the worldwide pharmaceutical market was USD1,143 billion, having doubled in just over a decade.² Current biosciences research projects are aimed at extending human life, curing cancer, reversing climate change and species extinction, replacing fossil fuels, transforming pollutants into benign substances, feeding the world’s growing population, and rewriting the genomic make-up of living organisms. It goes without saying that the stakes are high and the rhetoric around the field quixotic. Public and private investment has been bullish, while the expectation of profit bears little relationship to the slow pace and unpredictable outcomes of research and its translation into pharmaceutical product, clinical procedure, or environmental intervention.

Not surprisingly, investment in the biosciences has delivered an extraordinary building boom since the coming of the new millennium. But there is more to the architectural expression of the biosciences than accommodating the people, animals, services, and equipment needed for experimentation. The very act of committing vast resources into permanent structures is a declaration of faith in science and its potential discoveries. Budgets are sufficiently generous for these buildings to fulfill the particular ambitions and conceits of architects, clients, and occupants—indeed, for even the most preposterous ideas and luxurious fantasies to be realized. We might learn much about the biosciences from architecture, for here they are given their most legible, insistent, and nuanced articulation. In laboratory buildings for the biosciences we can learn much about architecture, too: its potential, its expressive force, its social effects, its disciplinary assumptions. Architecture is a symptom of the forces that work through and upon it. Architecture also structures and produces desire and plays a part in the disciplining of subjectivities. In laboratory buildings, architecture is all this, and more.

Many, however, still imagine laboratory buildings as warrens of endless corridors and closed doors behind which new discoveries are squirreled away³ and an unloved type where boffins are thought never to look up from their experiments or talk to one another.⁴ The leap from anonymous prefab shed, housing a functional stack of labs and pipes to today’s architectural edifices is overdrawn, and these claims need to be understood in light of the history of the laboratory building. The period of anonymity and pragmatism turns out to have been relatively short, as well as being much exaggerated for the purposes of dramatic contrast with today’s buildings. The history of laboratory architecture begins with a new form of knowledge emerging in the seventeenth century, which privileges the repeatable and observable experiment and assumes the availability of nature for transformation. To ensure repeatability, experimental knowledge required a neutral, equipped, and protected space that excluded anything (and anybody) outside of the parameters of the experiment. Such a space was not invented from scratch. The laboratory as an artifact—as a stand-alone and purpose-built structure—brought together a set of extant spaces and activities.⁵ The furnace rooms of alchemical transformation are often cited as the laboratory’s precursor, and they linger in the fantasy of the scientist secreted in the basement. Equally important for the laboratories of the life sciences are the sites and practices of acquisition and display, such as the Wunderkammer. These cabinets of curiosities brought together the encyclopedic collections of sixteenth-century gentlemen—from fossils to works of art, the stranger the better. The impulse to collect led to the formation of the museum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which itself developed as a key site for pursuing and exhibiting scientific knowledge. The places in which plants and animals could be cultivated outside of their natural habitats, such as the glasshouse, the zoological garden, and the aquarium, are also ancestors of the laboratory. The traces of these can be seen in the growth rooms and cabinets, the pathogen-free colonies and vivaria of contemporary research buildings. Early science was also taking place in hospitals and in asylums for the insane. Rooms designed for observation, such as the anatomical theater and the planetary observatory, as well as places set aside for the discussion of philosophical ideas, are also precedents. After the seventeenth century, these included the public rooms of the residences occupied by public persons⁶ and later clubs, salons, and learned societies established outside the home. Lastly, laboratory buildings incorporate spaces for contemplation and dissemination that derive from the library, the scholar’s study, and the classroom.

Bruno Latour argues that by the nineteenth century, laboratories were becoming special places to make specific goods—in this case facts—for a new emerging market, the scientific market.⁷ The laboratory was to science, what the factory was to capitalism.⁸ The standardization of experimental protocols and materials corresponds to the mass mobilization of scientific instruments and sees the expansion of new experimental setups.⁹ By the mid-twentieth century the laboratory had brought transformation, collection, cultivation, observation, discussion, contemplation, and production together in a recognizable format. The period coincided with the maturity of the modernist style. Modernist principles yielded open-plan laboratories organized by repeated modules of structure and furnishing, served by separate offices and service zones.¹⁰ Scientific ideals of rationality and fitness for purpose intersected with the functionalist strands of architectural modernism. So closely aligned are modernist functionalism and the laboratory program that it became possible to forget the presence of architecture.¹¹

Representative of this period is the Hoffman Laboratory of Experimental Geology (1963) at Harvard University by Walter Gropius’s The Architects Collaborative (TAC) (figure 1.1). One can see numerous lesser-known examples by lesser-known architects, which employ the same planning conventions—the J. Walter Wilson Laboratory (1962) at Brown University by Robinson, Green, and Beretta, for example, where each floor is dedicated to a different branch of biology, from animal physiology on the first to plants on the fourth. Even more severe than these two is the Richard King Mellon Hall of Science (1968), designed by Mies van der Rohe for Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. With its façade of black panels and small dark glass windows, it is unwelcoming and introverted, yet was awarded Laboratory of the Year in 1969 by Industrial Research Magazine. Jose Luis Sert’s muscular Science Center for Harvard University (1972) has a stepped form to accommodate outdoor patios, upon which scientists were to socialize on the rare occasions that the weather would permit (and is, vaguely, suggestive of the polaroid camera invented by the building’s primary donor, Edwin Land). These buildings tended to be constructed and owned by a university, buried deep in the campus, and narrow in their disciplinary attachments. Architecturally, each is notable for its focus on the functional demands of its wet laboratories, its visual impermeability, its lack of social amenity for its occupants, and its dearth of facilities for public engagement.

Figure 1.1

Hoffman Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1960). Architects: The Architects Collaborative (TAC), led by Walter Gropius. Photograph by Daderot.

The modernist laboratory captures a broader conceit: namely, the separation of science and society. This separation reached its climax in the decades of the Cold War. This is when the alliance of scientists and militaries transformed the confinement associated with laboratory buildings into geographic isolation and architectural fortification. Remote places became the sites of science. The Los Alamos National Laboratory (1943) in New Mexico is a prime example, Ozorsk (now Ozyorsk) its Soviet counterpart. Indeed, the closed cities for scientific and military research in the Soviet Union could be seen as the pinnacle of this expression of isolation, with all their denizens, scientists and otherwise, effectively quarantined. In the United States, a notable example of defensive architectural expression is Paul Rudolph’s Burroughs-Wellcome Laboratories (1969) in North Carolina (figure 1.2). The building is not geographically remote, but Rudolph’s design for the pharmaceutical company’s laboratories and headquarters is dramatically fortress-like, resembling a bunker even, with jutting angles and exposed aggregate concrete walls inside and out. According to the Paul Rudolph Foundation, the local community still refers to it, as the spaceship building.¹²

Figure 1.2

Burroughs-Wellcome Headquarters and Laboratories, Durham, North Carolina (1969). Architect: Paul Rudolph. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Foundation.

While entwined in the politics of the time, the midcentury laboratory was constructed in such a way that it conceptually excluded the public, along with the sociality of scientists and the dynamics of competing teams and disciplines. Louis Kahn’s design of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1965) in La Jolla, California, is one of the first to register the changing desires and conditions of science. This building’s importance in architecture and the social sciences is such that we devote the following chapter to its influence. What Kahn and the scientist Jonas Salk recognized was that efficiency and isolation were not the only driving forces of scientific practice, and nor were such forces the key determinants of the laboratory’s architectural expression. The shift they recognized, as Bruno Latour explains, derives from an explicit entanglement of the scientific and the social. He has suggested that a culture of science came to be replaced by a culture of research, which engages ideology and emotion. The shift reflects broader changes that swept across many disciplines in the wake of world wars and cold wars. The distinction for Latour is that science is cold, straight and detached; research is warm, involving and risky.¹³ Latour sums up the situation as a science freed from the politics of doing away with politics.¹⁴ In some ways, the shift heralded a return of the theatrical public demonstrations of science that characterized the mid-nineteenth century, not so much in live performances, but through a range of media, including architecture.¹⁵

Beyond Functionality

The explicit entanglement of science and sociopolitical concerns has seen the scientist reemerge onto the civic stage with a broad range of skills, including those related to fund-raising, team-building, educational outreach, media wrangling, community liaison, and public relations. To enable this wider remit, new buildings for the biosciences go well beyond the functionality of their technical apparatus. Take, for example, the Cha Bio Complex (2015) in Pangyo, Korea, designed by the American firm KMD Architects and Korean architects Designcamp Moon Park. Alongside its research laboratories, vivarium, offices, and tissue bank are conference, exhibition, and cultural facilities including a 3D media hall, dormitories for researchers and guest housing for important visiting researchers, offices for venture capital businesses, an invitro fertilization clinic, a health club with lap pool, a cafeteria and cafés, a library, meadow gardens, and, to top it off, a lounge with a medieval-style pipe organ.¹⁶ Semipublic spaces for socialization, collaboration, presentation, and persuasion now take up a greater proportion of habitable floor space than wet laboratories and clean rooms. In addition, there are dramatic atria, sculptural stairs, and circulation routes incorporating conversation nooks and views into the laboratories. No longer hidden away, bioscience laboratories now occupy prime real estate, perhaps none more so than the Parc de Recerca de Barcelona (PRBB), where its scientists play volleyball on the Platja de la Barceloneta (figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3

Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) (2006), Barcelona, Spain, from the sea. Architect: Manuel Brullet and Albert de Pineda. Photograph by Javier Ortega Figueiral (2012).

The novelty of the bioscience laboratory building today is that architecture is regarded as a means to achieve organizational aims. Architecture is engaged to recruit star scientists, inspire young people to embark upon careers in science, and attract philanthropy and industry partners. It is architecture that sponsors conversation and collaboration between scientists and enhances the performance and health of employees, and, thus, it accelerates discovery. Architecture is charged with engaging the public in scientific endeavors. It does so literally through spaces in which events for advancement and industry participation might be hosted, as well as by communicating the importance (and content) of scientific research. Nigel Thrift describes the new buildings that are part of the biosciences boom as traps for innovation and invention.¹⁷

These ambitions respond to a diverse array of ideological and economic forces encompassing neoliberal concepts of knowledge work, the reification of innovation, and the free-market entrepreneur. They also respond to technological change and shifting financial institutions and structures. The corporatization of universities and the concomitant uptake of collegial organization in industry are factors, as is the growth of speculative real-estate development in the provision of science facilities. Belief in science as a means of addressing aging (indeed, mortality itself) and other big problems also fuels the growth in biosciences research. Every nation-state from Botswana to Bolivia has official policies for the promotion of biosciences research and development.¹⁸ Laboratories have become sites of power and prestige, faith and ambition. They are places that link nations into the global trade of scientific knowledge.

The contemporary research laboratory has joined the museum and the art gallery as a building type deserving of a prominent site and a signature architect, iconic treatment and civic pride, public investment and private philanthropy. The Lewis Thomas Laboratory for Molecular Biology (1986) at Princeton University by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates is a harbinger of this change. The architects added a patterned brick skin and classical details to a functional laboratory layout by Payette Associates. Although Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates were already well known, it was another five years before Robert Venturi (without Denise Scott Brown) was named a Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest accolade in the profession. The more recent run of laboratory commissions to Pritzker Laureates has come after their win: clients are clearly concerned with the prestige that an awarded architect brings to the building. Indeed, on the Cornell University homepage for Weill Hall (2008), the opening sentence declares the building was designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Richard Meier.¹⁹ Meier won in 1984. His design for the Ithaca campus, constructed at a cost of USD 162 million, is characteristically white, crisp, and corporate. Other starchitects have made better use of the opportunity to deploy their form-making and expressive prowess beyond the application of surface patterns. At a cost of USD146 million in 2003, the curvaceous James H. Clark Center for Bio-X at Stanford University was designed by architect Sir Norman Foster, winner in 1999 (figure 1.4). Pritzker Laureates, Frank Gehry (1989), Rafael Moneo (1996), and Zaha Hadid (2004) are respectively responsible for: the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT (2004; USD 283.5 million), the Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering at Harvard University (2007; USD 155 million), and Biopolis in Singapore (2003–2006; USD 457 million). In the following decade, Jean Nouvel (Pritzker 2008) completed the Institut des maladies génétiques Imagine in Paris (2014; USD 46 million), and Renzo Piano (Pritzker 1998) the Jerome L. Greene Science Center in New York (2016; USD 250 million).

Figure 1.4

James H. Clark Center (2003), Stanford University, Stanford, California, at night. Architect: Foster and Partners. Photograph by Anirudh Rao (2010).

Pritzker Laureates Rafael Moneo, Tadao Ando, and Fumihiko Maki, as well as Alvaro Siza, Kazuo Sejima, and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA have all designed laboratory buildings for the Basel campus of the pharmaceutical giant Novartis. Herzog and de Meuron (2001 Laureates) completed an office tower, Asklepios 8 (2015), at Novartis, as well as the headquarters (2010) and laboratory (2013) for rival pharmaceutical company, Actelion, in Basel. Biosciences architecture is now divided between the laboratory planning consultancies and specialists, who ensure the functionality of the wet laboratory proper, and the high-profile design architects commissioned to design the surrounding spaces of research buildings and express the conversational and convivial aspirations of the scientific organization.

Cathedral-Like

Given their cultural and economic significance, along with the role of scientific knowledge as a secular belief-system, laboratories are often likened to cathedrals. An article in Nature on the Francis Crick Institute (2016), London, was titled Europe’s Superlab: Sir Paul’s Cathedral.²⁰ Sir Paul Nurse, diplomatically avoiding the implied slight that the building is a vehicle for his personal aggrandizement, responded, You need to go into a building and feel inspiration. That is what is so beautiful about a medieval cathedral—you are inspired whatever your religious beliefs might be.²¹ The architects, HOK, have encouraged the analogy, describing its entrance as cathedral-like and designing the building around a lofty nave.²² The Francis Crick Institute cost USD 790 million (GBP 650 million) to construct, a considerable outlay at a time of economic austerity, which, like a cathedral, required the indulgence of the public and the promise that future benefits would accrue—in the form of a longer life, rather than an afterlife. At nearly 1 million square feet (93,000 square meters), it has just slightly less useable floor area than the British Museum. This British example is not exceptional in the scale of its resource investment, although it is unusually pedestrian in its architecture.²³ The Belfer Building in New York City cost USD 650 million, while Australia’s Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (2016) was constructed for USD 761 million (AUD 1 billion). But it is not only the largest laboratory projects that have social, affective, and aesthetic aspirations.

Sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina also engages the analogy between the cathedral and the laboratory. For her the laboratory houses within itself the circuits of observation and the traffic of experience which twelfth- and thirteenth-century cathedral builders brought about through travel, and it includes an exchange of specimens, tools, and materials.²⁴ Knorr Cetina is interested in the social construction of scientific knowledge, which she sees as being enabled by laboratories because of their place in a wider network of experimentation and knowledge exchange. And yet, there is a profound difference between the laboratory and the cathedral, which gets passed over in this analogy. For those building them, the cathedral was also the subject of aesthetic and structural experimentation. Going higher and leaner was the experiment. We will argue that in the contemporary laboratory, scientists are the subjects in an experiment in social engineering and public persuasion, for which there is a dearth of evidence and a vague methodology. Through architecture, desired behaviors are to be elicited. The concept, known as architectural determinism, has been largely debunked in academic circles, but is alive and well in the design of laboratory buildings. In the case of hospitals and schools, it has morphed into evidence-based design. The tenacity with which architects have held on to architectural determinism, as Robert Gutman and Barbara Westergaard skeptically pointed out in 1974, has a lot do with the individual architect’s need to justify his or her work.²⁵ It is not so much cynical opportunism that pervades the laboratory design sector, but a feverish optimism that both architects and scientists are caught up in about their professional responsibility, and ability, to improve the world. This makes laboratory buildings sites of intense rhetoric and hyperbole, as well as of formal and spatial experimentation that spans the gamut from the banal to the brilliant. Their recurring features and effects will be interrogated in the following chapters.

Architect Frank Gehry, another Pritzker Laureate, reveals both the desire for and the lingering doubt about architecture’s capacity to shape scientific discovery. When speaking of his design for the Ray and Maria Stata Center (2004) at MIT, he hopes accidental or contrived collisions between people will lead to the breakthroughs and the positive results. Gehry says, I think that’s really going to work.²⁶ He speculates, but does not know. Scientists would never excuse their peers for such imprecision, but when it comes to architectural speculation, they may not be so exacting. Rodney Brooks, the roboticist and director of the Stata Center, discussed with Wired magazine his research group’s relocation to the Gehry designed laboratory. He said, Maybe it will destroy us. Who knows? I prefer to be optimistic.²⁷ This book is not concerned with whether or not new laboratory buildings perform as expected. It was never our intent to undertake post-occupancy evaluations, and, in any case, it is impossible to ascribe discoveries to architecture rather than to, say, funding, effective leadership, timing, good fortune, or genius. Even where the co-location of previously dispersed researchers is found to have had a positive effect on research activity and collaboration, this is not necessarily tied to specific architectural qualities or tactics. Indeed, transdisciplinary co-location was a feature of MIT’s Building 20 (1943–1999), the hastily erected temporary structure from which many of the occupants of the Stata Center had decamped. The degraded and undesirable qualities of Building 20, not any architectural merit, made it a place where various innovators, from Noam Chomsky to the first hackers, could work creatively.²⁸ With this in mind, LabOratory is concerned with the nature and consequences of the expectations scientists and architects have for their new buildings, not the elusive evidence that might justify them. We have identified three common and consistently repeated ambitions. These are easier to understand by first returning briefly to the cathedral.

A Common Rhetoric

The cathedral requires three things of its architecture. First, it secures a protected, or sacred, space set apart from the profane. Second, its architecture (and embedded art) expresses the doctrine and teachings of the faith in ways that reach an illiterate audience. Third, it choreographs the performance of the liturgy and, thus, the relationships the members of the congregation have with each other, with their church and clergy, and with their Christian God. The first demand is fulfilled by the detachment of the cathedral from other buildings. While usually centrally located in an urban setting that it anchors and dominates, the cathedral’s separation from the world of commerce is emphasized by an empty space or plaza between it and the town hall or market. Separation is further reinforced by an elaborate and over-sized portal, and by the fineness of its stone masonry. Its dark, cool, and quiet interior heightens the contrast with the outside world. The stained-glass windows, carved gargoyles, statuary, and other narrative and iconographic works of art are expressions related to the second demand a cathedral makes of its architecture. The spatial unity of the composition, the processional aisles and ambulatory paths for ritualized events, the shared pews, and the location of the clergy at the altar relate to the third objective. The cruciform plan addresses both representative content and spatial choreography by reminding the congregation of Christ’s sacrifice and catering to procession and formality. The verticality that organizes structure, surface, and space—from the elongation of the ribbed vaults to the towers flanking the entrance—expresses the idea of an all-seeing God above the earth. While historians of medieval architecture would most certainly contest this simplification and argue the many differences between, say, the German, English, and French Gothic cathedral, there is nevertheless, a recognizable formation or typology.

In the eighteenth century, the French architect Julien-David Le Roy used the consistency of the Christian church plan to mount an argument for the basis of architectural beauty in the timeless principles of human aesthetic perception. The single plate in his Histoire de la disposition et des forms différentes que les Chrétiens ont données leurs temples (1764) shows plans of churches built between AD 320 and 1764 in different places (figure 1.5). If there was any historical development in the type, it is not clear, for they are not arranged on the page in any sequence. Minor variations and details in their design are textually and graphically suppressed. LeRoy—in response to criticism—attempted in the revised edition of Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Gréce (1770) a new drawing that brought together temples and cathedrals from different cultures in chronological order. But, as Jeanne Kisacky attests, the ambition remained to uncover universal laws structuring specific forms and events, much as his three scientist brothers were doing in their respective fields of horology, medicine, and electricity.²⁹ Le Roy was one of the first architectural historians to adopt from natural history the taxonomical approach to drawing subjects at the same scale, side by side, according to their type. J. N. L. Durand developed the genre further in his Recueil et parallele des édifices de tout genre, anciens et modernes (1801), a pictorial atlas of buildings sorted either by purpose (hospitals, cathedrals, prisons) or by architect (Palladio, Inigo Jones).

Figure 1.5

Julien-David Le Roy’s Genealogy of the Christian Church, 1764, from Histoire de la disposition et des formes différentes que les Chrétiens ont données à leurs temples (Paris; Desaint & Saillant, 1764). Courtesy of the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

In the nineteenth century the French architect and theorist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc reimagined the Gothic in the process of restoring cathedrals across France. Drawing upon biology, Viollet-le-Duc formulated a cathédrale idéale, which was intended to reveal the rational structural principles common to all built cathedrals. Real cathedrals were viewed as variations on, or transformations of, this theoretical type. For him, all of the elements of the cathedral, including its decorative and iconographical design, grew from the functional necessity of satisfying the ambition for height. Viollet-le-Duc’s belief that successive generations of cathedral builders were striving toward the perfect resolution of the type reflects an evolutionary idea. The architecture of the cathedral develops and progresses as nature does in the creation of beings; starting from a very simple principle which it then modifies, which it perfects, which it makes more complicated, but without ever destroying the original essence.³⁰

Compared with the cathedral, there seems to be little foundation for grouping laboratory buildings together and no possibility of drawing a laboratoire idéale. Formally, they are as irreconcilable as a transistor radio is to a drone, a talking doll, a cordless shaver, or an electric bicycle—although all are battery operated and thus have similar inner workings. The architecture of the contemporary biosciences laboratory is as heterogeneous as these gadgets, despite each having a wet laboratory as its core purpose and inner organ. The accounts architects, clients and critics give of laboratory buildings, however, are strikingly homogenous. The following description of the biochemistry laboratory at the University of Oxford (2008) designed by Hawkins Brown is representative. We are told that the building

ensures the 300 researchers working there communicate as much as possible. The traditional layout is reversed here, labs are on the outside, divided by clear glass walls from the write-up areas, which are open to the vast, five-story atrium. Everyone is visible. Open staircases clad in warm wood fly across the atrium at odd angles, and each floor hosts a cluster of inviting squashy leather chairs and coffee tables, giving the impression of an upmarket hotel.³¹

The Whole Building Design Guide is published by the National Institute of Building Sciences in the United States and is far less effusive. Most of its attention is given to pragmatic questions of servicing and planning, yet it gives this advice to the architect of research laboratories:

Entrances and public greeting spaces must make the first impression unforgettable. A mix of scientific displays, interactive flat panel screens and real-time or digital video views into best teaching and research labs in action should be a basic requirement. The design should provide an unlimited access to the rich world of discovery.³²

Every laboratory architect, every laboratory client, declares the same three aspirations: to eliminate boundaries; to communicate the potential benefits and interest of its research programs; and to foster collaboration amongst its scientists. In brief, these three rhetorical deferrals will be elaborated across this book in corresponding key sections: Boundaries, Expression, and Socialization.

Firstly, boundaries. Despite various characterizations of science as ‘public knowledge,’ writes Steven Shapin, it is made and evaluated in some of our most private places. … You do not wander into CERN or SLAC. We typically now enter the places where scientific knowledge is made only by special arrangement and on a special basis: we come as visitors, as guests in a house were nobody lives.³³ Biological containment and the securitization of costly experiments and equipment would seem to justify the attention given to boundary-making and policing, yet the concern for laboratory boundaries lies equally with the need to legitimize scientific expertise, to create a place of order apart from the chaos of the world. These concerns are rarely addressed explicitly. Instead, claims are made about the openness of the laboratory, its accessibility and transparency. The tension between containment and isolation and the demand for institutional accountability animates the design of the contemporary laboratory. It is a tension that is particularly acute at successive thresholds and openings in these thresholds: the perimeters of laboratory grounds and compounds; the envelope of buildings; and the walls around wet labs and clean rooms.

Secondly, expression. Nigel Thrift notes that the new generation of biosciences buildings often include an explicit attempt to represent ‘life’, whether that be swooping architecture, some forms of public display of science or similar devices.³⁴ More specifically, attempts are made to convey scientific content or subjects. Of the Blizard Building (2005) at Queen Mary University of London—a building we discuss in detail in chapter 6—architect Will Alsop proposes that the very fabric of the building speaks about science.³⁵ Replacing ignorance and fear of science with desire and understanding is assumed to lead to greater financial and community support for experimental research (or at least less resistance to it). Architecture is expected to assist in the positive representation of scientific content.

The scientific content drawn from the life sciences tends to be living organisms and their composite parts. In fact, it includes the technical images with which science represents those subjects and is able to make them work for science—the double-helix of DNA, the periodic table, and the chromosomal map, to name a few. The modes of communication of scientific content in the building type are extraordinarily diverse and stretch from analogies that are obvious, such as the brain-shaped neurosciences research center or the application of images of cells on a façade, to analogies that are ambiguous and multivalent. For example, the colored Rorschach inkblot patterns laminated to the glazed front elevation of the University of Oxford’s Biochemistry Building (2008) are intended as reminders of the suggestive nature and imprecision of perception—a critique of scientific truths that may itself get lost in translation.

Scientific content also includes the values and identities of individual scientists, and expressions of this may be as unambiguous as naming a building after an acclaimed researcher or entail more complex strategies of portrayal and allegiance. Some laboratories come close to the use of gargoyles and depictions of liturgy and saints in stained glass. Not surprisingly, problems of translation and transformation in this situation abound. The convergence of architecture and science in the design of laboratory buildings is further complicated by the traffic of concepts, techniques, and images between the two fields. For example, double-helical stairs, or escalier Leonardesca, predate Watson and Crick’s 1953 announcement of the discovery of the structure of the DNA. Their contemporary use in science buildings may pay homage to Leonardo da Vinci, but the iconic status of DNA in popular culture overwhelms their architectural ancestry.³⁶

Thirdly, socialization. Laboratory design is said to accelerate discovery by provoking serendipitous conversations. Typically, the means of enhancing socialization has been conceived by the architects as the provision of attractive shared areas and circulation spaces that encourage scientists to bump into each other. The point of the café, the open stair, or squashy leather chairs is not merely to make it possible for scientists to socialize, or even to entice them, but to convey the desirability of (and potential reward for) social behaviors in the workplace. We will discuss in chapter 12 how the key idea of socializing slides into subject production, for these devices are engaged in the disciplining of the scientist subject within a neoliberal frame of immaterial work. We do not mean that scientists are passively manipulated. Many scientists subscribe to an idea of their work as creative, social, and independent of management strictures. Some are involved in the design briefing and review process, where they reiterate their hope for spaces that foster the workplace culture they desire. The socialization of the scientist is a cultivation of behaviors and concretization of relationships, teams, and hierarchies. At the same time, it is a representation of those desired behaviors and relations.

If, the second ambition sees architects focusing on science as content for expression, in meeting the third aspiration, the focus is on the scientist as content producer and knowledge worker. There is, as with the cathedral’s crucifix plan, a grey area where spatial choreography and expression converge. The need to reassure the public that scientific work is collaborative and that clandestine projects are impossible directs architecture toward the representation of interaction, inclusivity, and transparency. Hence, some laboratories are designed to convey collision through dynamic forms or to express community through the inclusion of spaces intended to resemble