Those present represented lab innovation – from pure research to routine mass-testing; from medical, pharmaceutical and genetics, to battery technology..
‘It’s quite nice to sit down there and have a conversation if you want to.’.Indeed, the atrium sets the tone for what is undeniably one of Circle Reading’s key architectural features - space.
‘Everything about this place is space,’ says Raj Goel.‘There’s nice space everywhere.’.The facility generously houses five theatres, thirty inpatient and twenty day case beds, fifteen consulting rooms and an extensive rehabilitation department.
Describing the process of layout design for the hospital, Wood notes that the more Bryden Wood understood about the hospital and its patients, the more they were able to ‘codify their operations, their adjacencies and their spaces…’ He discusses the fact that Bryden Wood were able to benefit from a considerable amount of consultation and direct input from the professionals who were actually going to be using the facility.All of that knowledge was then enshrined into a three dimensional design tool, he says, which became like a ‘vocabulary of spaces…’.
Wood also describes how such a level of understanding about the function of the building, led logically to the next step of applying a level of systemization to its construction, in order to underpin it and make construction more efficient.
‘We understood...the scale and the spans that the structure would require’ he says.It’s up to the services engineer to fully understand the client laboratory equipment, the room requirements, the health and safety issues and the processes within the lab, as well as understanding what the other disciplines need to provide.
The purpose of the lab space is to provide the users with a safe and controlled environment for their experiments and processes, which are undertaken by and within lab equipment.The equipment is the primary point of a lab.
This equipment is often heavily serviced, so the services take priority; perhaps much more so than in other building types.It’s the services engineer’s responsibility to coordinate the disciplines and disseminate information to all the relevant parties to ensure their services can be properly provided..
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