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Architects: Allies and Morrison
- Area: 18150 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:James Newton
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Manufacturers: KEIM
Text description provided by the architects. The Sir Michael Uren Hub at Imperial College London brings together research labs, offices, and social spaces for over 500 engineers, clinicians, and scientists involved in the development of medical technologies to improve the treatment and diagnosis of diverse medical conditions, from finding ways to cure dementia to creating bionic limbs.
As one of the UK’s foremost innovators in cement manufacturing, Sir Michael’s legacy can be seen in the very fabric of the building. He developed ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS), a by-product of making steel, as a replacement for carbon-intensive cement in concrete production. Our design for the north and south facades connects the work of the benefactor, the aspiration to reduce emissions,s and our desire for a white appearance by pioneering the use of GGBS in architectural concrete. It replaced 50% of cement and reduced the carbon footprint of the facade.
These facades are animated by distinctive fields of 1,300 fins, each four meters tall, cast, and installed in seven different permutations. Their seemingly randomized arrangement provides shading and privacy and yields a rhythmic pattern that evokes the biomedical research in the building: the coming together of the artificial and the organic, of engineering and medicine.
Occupiers come from this breadth of disciplines to co-locate, each with very specific needs: musculoskeletal medical engineering, joint replacement, cardiovascular science, dementia, air quality, and public health. To accommodate such diversity required highly flexible and efficient architecture and infrastructure, which houses nine research groups in eleven different fit-out layouts. Materials are functional yet beautiful, their palette carefully restrained to provide a backdrop to the science. Tall ceilings and windows create pleasant environments in which to work and exchange ideas.
The building is set within the rapidly changing environment of Imperial’s new White City campus. Its future neighbor to the northwest will be a purpose-built home for the School of Public Health, also currently in design by Allies and Morrison. The part clinic, part lab, part classroom, part office, and the Uren Building is a new typology of the urban scientific building – a hybrid one, able to nurture multiple strands of scientific discovery all under one roof for societal benefit.
