Leadership Gratitude
Established in 1994, ZHCollective | Habitat Architects is a multidisciplinary architecture and design practice working across private residential, hospitality, commercial and civic architecture, interior design, urban design and master planning.
Research architecture operates under an unusual set of pressures. It must control air, contaminants, access, servicing and equipment with a degree of precision rarely demanded of ordinary workplaces. At the same time, research itself increasingly depends on interdisciplinary exchange, rapid technological change and sustained periods of concentrated human work.
The architectural question is therefore larger than laboratory planning.How can a research building protect scientific rigour while creating the physical conditions for discovery?This paper examines the relationship between containment, modularity, circulation, environmental performance, collaboration, daylight and landscape in contemporary R&D architecture. Drawing on current research-facility standards and studies of scientific workplaces, it develops a design framework that informed the Mankind R&D Centre by ZHCollective | Habitat Architects.The project, titled The Living Genome, treats the R&D building as an adaptive working ecology: controlled where science demands control, connected where knowledge benefits from exchange, and sufficiently flexible to absorb forms of research that do not yet exist.
Research Buildings Begin With Control
The architecture of an R&D facility is shaped by things that are often invisible.
- Air pressure
- Exhaust
- Contaminant pathways