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Tracing Kahn
Foster and Partners' Sir Alexander Fleming Building, Imperial College, London, adapts space planning and management techniques from office design, and employs bold colour, to make inspired use of a constrained site
It is nearly 40 years since Norman Foster attended masterclasses on the top floor of Louis Kahn's University Art Gallery at Yale. The influence of Kahn has surfaced many times since in Foster's own work, and is certainly apparent in Foster & Partners' new medical and biological research building at Imperial College, London. Opened last autumn, the Sir Alexander Fleming Building is something of a hybrid, combining heavily used undergraduate teaching facilities with more specialised provision for doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. Its programme bears relatively little resemblance, in fact, to the iconic (but, in practice, flawed) models of laboratory design set down by Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania and in California in the Sixties.
Foster & Partners' association with Imperial College (IC) (effectively the MIT of the UK and chasing Cambridge for top place in the scientific research stakes) began in 1991. Appointment as masterplanners to IC led naturally to the practice's role as planners of 'Albertopolis', embracing the whole of the South Kensington museums and education quarter and the subject of an (unsuccessful) Millennium Lottery bid. Albertopolis is, according to Foster director Spencer de Grey, far from dead: a less costly version is being developed by a partnership between IC, the Science Museum and the V&A. Meanwhile, the restructuring of the IC campus continues. John McAslan's extension to the library (AJ 15.1.98) is diametrically opposite the new Foster building, across the Queen's Lawn, a pleasing open space dominated by the great tower – all that survived the 1960s – of T E Collcutt's Imperial Institute.
IC has grown relatively slowly in comparison with other UK universities – the stress is on quality, with a high proportion of postgraduates. A major landmark in the college's history was the development of a medical school as a result of the reorganisation of medical education in London initiated under Virginia Bottomley. Up to 1000 students based at St Mary's and Charing Cross hospitals now go to South Kensington for lectures and laboratory sessions – the patients remain elsewhere. On the ground and first floors of the Alexander Fleming Building there are lecture theatres (with video links to the hospital sites) and seminar rooms. A wing extending at right angles to the rear of the virtually square (45 x 42m) main block contains floors of flexible laboratories and computer rooms for undergraduates.
There is a Kahnian touch in the prominent glazed service tower (housing lifts, stairs and wcs) which looks northwards across to the Collcutt tower, reflecting a strategy of locating services at the perimeter. Both brick and (more sparingly) Portland stone have been used to integrate the new building into its context. A very unscientific Kahn project, the Mellon Center at Yale, is evoked inside, where timber panels, infilling an expressed fair-faced concrete frame, are pierced by the windows of offices looking down into the semi-public entrance concourse, with its attractive café. This is a lively social focus and can be both crowded and noisy when lecture theatres disgorge hundreds of students. There is a view up from this space into the world of research above, but the noise does not penetrate. A glazed acoustic screen divides the two domains. Spencer de Grey concedes that 'there were lessons to be learned from Cambridge' (where there have been persistent complaints about distracting noise within Foster's Law Faculty library).
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