Design Drawings
type | ACADEMIC status | COMPLETED year | 2019
Form Diagrams
While mapping the site, I looked specifically at the high and low temperature zones around the site to determine where my building must be placed. This, along with the location of the dense grove of trees informed the building's climatic and contextual response. The warmer exposed ground surface to the south of the site would cause the air to heat up and rise, creating a low-pressure zone, pulling in cooler air from the north and through the grove. This building straddles an ecotone between the exposed earth and the heavily vegetated grove.
The design attempts to use as much solar energy as possible, requiring the entire roof to be a designated solar surface facing the south. However, to prevent heat gain to the labs from this solar surface, it is propped several meters above the top of the lab by a superstructure that gives it an insulating gap - thus, the lab and solar surface are essentially two nested structures.
The open space between the pitched solar surface and the labs acts as a wind tunnel, drawing cold air up from the grove around the lab volumes. This cool air around the labs lowers the point thermal equilibrium, slowing the rate of heat gain (or, in terms of air conditioning, the loss of cooling potential).
To minimise the ground footprint of the building, the majority of the building is raised off the ground through sets of portals that are supported by piles. The open area under the building is allowed to be taken over with a curated ecosystem consisting of local plants used for landscape and plants that make up the understory layer of the adjacent grove, bolstering the "ecotone" on which the building sits.
The Design
Based on the climatic and ecological context, the building came up as a series of "stand-alone" lab modules, suspended by a superstructure of portal frames which also supported the solar roof. These labs are linked to circulation cores and workspaces through a single corridor at higher levels. Because each lab functions as a sealed module, the corridor does not require any special treatment, other than basic air conditioning.
The labs are organised in groups of three, creating smaller process loops so that silicon wafers or materials do not have to be transported over long distances: each group contains a lithography and etching lab, a fabrication lab, and a characterisation lab. The characterisation lab is in the centre, with no service corridor. Both the other labs have a service corridor abutting the equipment bay to house back-end services such as vacuum pumps and water purifiers. The characterisation lab of this capacity does not require back-end services (however, certain characterisation processes that do require back-end services are located on the ground floor such as the "SEM Lab"). There are three such wings of labs, two at the "Third Level", and one at the "Fourth Level", for a total of nine suspended labs.
The office blocks, services and circulation cores, and conference centres all occupy volumes at the junction of two wings. However, while the labs each serve as free-standing modules, the office blocks are stacked so as to increase the workspace without compromising the structural system that supports the labs.
The free-standing labs have a fan-like-form, with the space between the labs left open - this is important as it allows diffused sunlight to reach the ground surface allowing understory plants to grow well in an area that would otherwise be rendered dark and sterile.
The building has a very low footprint at the ground level, housing certain services and public functions such as a cafeteria.
The majority of the ground level consists of landscaping, a trail for walking and an outdoors seating area. Besides these secondary functions, the ground level is extremely important layer of the building: it consists of bales of moss, bioswales, weeds and scrub, leaf-litter and understory plants. These are important because they ensure that the soil, or the "rhizosphere" remains an active ecological system, and is kept safe from erosion and drying out by maintaining a stratum of decaying organic matter on top of it. The decaying organic matter is broken down by non-human entities in the soil such as earthworms, isopods, fungi, and beetles, creating a new stratum of topsoil that is rich in nutrients and allows plants to take root easily. The advantage of this system is that it is not necessary to build up or create an ecology for this area: all we have to do is facilitate the growth of plants that may spread naturally from the grove into the pseudo-designed landscape. The grove is allowed to permeate the building as a blurred line rather than the built edge being a completely rigid, walled-in edge.
A small fraction of the site houses six ground floor labs (seen above on the right), specialised labs that are partially sunken into the ground along a rising contour of the site. These are a distinct wing from the main building and they function as a closed unit in themselves.
A longitudinal section of the lab showing the built-up portal frame superstructure, the suspended corridor and the various services and "crawl spaces" above and below the labs: including the mechanical ventilation system connected to the HEPA and ULPA filter units in the ceiling of the lab. The only part of the building that rises above the canopy layer of the grove is the solar surface, which captures enough solar energy to run the secondary lighting and electrical systems entirely (not including the Air-Handling-Units and other machinery).
The labs are at a height such that a moderate amount of diffused light reached to most areas under the lab volume, making it possible for weeds, lichen and small plants to grow.
This is a section through the office and circulation blocks: these blocks are at the junction of two sets of labs, abutted on either edge by services corridors. In the cross section of the lab to the right of the office block, you can see the complete superstructure that holds up the lab, as well as the internal systems of the lab and the spaces given for "back-end services".
In total, there are two office blocks with seven workspaces: two per level and one adjacent to the labs on the "Fourth Level".
In this longitudinal section of the suspended labs building, you can see the variation in the ground plane which prompted an extra level to be created for more lab modules.
The southern elevation of the building is shielded from the hot sun by the solar surface. Although the corridor is glazed, a secondary layer of terracotta louvres breaks the harsh southern glare of the sun and prevents unnecessary heat gain; this makes the corridor an additional layer of thermal insulation for the lab modules.
The drawings are illustrated with overt greenery and in a way wherein the building seems almost non-existent; this was the intention of my thesis; to create a building for science that has absolutely rigid functionality requirements, and place it in the midst of a dense grove; where the scientists, researchers and students can exit a Class 1000 clean room, and enter a forest for their evening tea.
This page is part of the expanded series about my design dissertation completed in April 2019. On the links below, you can continue to "Structure", the next page in this series.