The title may sound a little abstract and philosophical, but I mean it in the literal sense. How does the layout of buildings, labs, offices, benches, meeting rooms affect how science is done by the people occupying those spaces?
This was a topic that came up yesterday at our pub night in Cambridge. There’s been such a buzz about collaborative research lately and the need to build buildings in ways that encourage more interaction. But some people pointed out yesterday, experiments in science architecture can go awry.
Some are built to be so open that people never feel like they have any privacy and they can’t get any peace and quiet to, you know, get work done.
Some are built in such a siloed way that people from one lab never see those from the lab next door.
And others are somehow able to get the balance just right.
Examples mentioned last night of new buildings that try to achieve these aims are Stanford’s Clark Center, HHMI’s Janelia Farm, the Broad Institute here in Cambridge, the environmentally friendly Genzyme building near MIT. (I won’t say which ones were criticized and which were praised!)
What are some other research buildings that are not your typical rooms-coming-off-long-hallways? And do they work in getting people to interact more? How?
The Isaac Newton Institute is really well designed for this. Aside from the infamous blackboards in the toilets and lifts, it has an central coffee area on the first floor, by the central (open) stairwell. The offices are all off the central stairwell, with no long corridors.
There is a lecture hall on the ground floor (where Fermat’s Last Theorem was proved), and the hold workshops there, so there are often people around to talk to (I was at one, which is how I know about the place). But because the meeting held is on the ground floor, the upper floors aren’t crowded with people (they still go up, but less so if there is coffee available downstairs).
My graduate lab was located in a office off a long hallway-type building, and I felt like I missed out a bit because I rarely interacted with the other labs on our floor… but my undergraduate lab was a different story. I worked in an NMR lab that was connected to a crystallography lab, and the setup was really great. The space was divided into smaller area so there was some privacy, but there was a ton of exchange between the groups as people passed through to go get lunch or coffee. I hope the trend of interactive space continues to catch on!