Herzog & de Meuron and BDP's medical research site for AstraZeneca facilitates movement and visibility while offering more than a nod to placemaking, earning a RIBA East Award
2025 RIBA East Award
Health
Herzog & de Meuron / BDP for AstraZeneca
Contract value: Confidential
GIA: 62,842m2
Designing a medical research facility on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus for AstraZeneca would be a tough technical challenge for any architectural practice. Lengthy delays, caused by the pharmaceutical company’s need to focus on the Covid-19 pandemic, added to the project’s complicated history following the success of Herzog & de Meuron and BDP in the international design competition held back in 2012.
Echoing the shape of its site, the scheme adopts a curved triangular plan, helping to create a stronger street presence than is typically found in science parks. In the centre, serviced by a well-positioned canteen, is a generously proportioned, publicly accessible courtyard – a reference to Cambridge college quadrangles. Here, on warm days, the facility’s staff can choose a place to sit, depending on the level of sun or shade required.
Echoing the sawtooth roofline, the strict geometry of the continuously-serrated glass facade offers a variety of breakout spaces along the inner and outer perimeter walls for meetings or conversations. The corners of the triangle serve as open-plan offices.
The rest of the space in the three above-ground floors is organised around three, paired sets of research laboratories, which create and test medicines and vaccines using advanced robotics. These laboratories have full-height interior glass walls so everyone can see what is going on, yet are also highly secure. Cleverly inserted interconnecting corridors allow scientists to move from one lab to another.
Beneath the ground is a deep, two-storey basement where a lot of specialised equipment undoubtedly adds to the substantial overall cost required to provide a suitably state-of-the-art scientific facility. Fourteen separate heating control systems enable the adjustment of temperature within the different areas of this elegant and functional building. Heating and cooling are supplied by a remote ground-source heat pump – claimed to be Europe’s largest – on the edge of the science park.
One would forgive the design team if they concentrated on the science alone, yet there is more than a nod to placemaking here. The building’s shape forms a generous triangular interface between it and the adjacent hospitals – the Royal Papworth and Addenbrooke’s – that it ultimately serves.
Visually and ecologically attractive, the space includes a green wall and a range of uncommon native apple trees among its topiary and grass. The overall effect is welcoming on a campus which is otherwise businesslike and workaday.
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RIBA UK Awards 2025 sponsored by Autodesk, EH Smith, Equitone and VELUX