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SAHMRI’s glass facade a spiky wonder

Aug 26, 2013
The SAHMRI facade is still a work in progress. Photo: Woods Bagot

The SAHMRI facade is still a work in progress. Photo: Woods Bagot

The under-construction SAHMRI building is described by one of its creators as the “pinecone” of North Terrace. He means it lovingly.

Up close, the description is apt – either that or a cheese grater.

The $200 million building,  which will be a centre of scientific research for SAHMRI’s 300 researchers, plus teams from the CSIRO and the state’s three universities, is covered in thousands of triangular panes of glass, most with their own individual metal sunshade which stick out from the building’s façade like a pinecone’s scales.

SAHMRI hopes to attract world leading researchers – part of the reason the architects were asked to make the building’s aesthetics so strikingly unique – in fields including Aboriginal health, cancer research, nutrition, immunity and brain research.

The building contains a small particle accelerator in the basement to produce radioactive isotopes, which SAHMRI hopes to sell to the state’s hospitals to use in cancer therapies.

The site also includes a large level given over to animal housing, needed for the thousands of live specimens the building’s scientists will use in their research.

The façade – reportedly so complex it pushed back the building’s completion date – is designed as a thick skin which wraps the entire building. It’s built to be self-supporting, with each window stitched together via a thick lattice of steel window frames.

SAHMRI's glass scales. Image: Woods Bagot

SAHMRI’s glass scales. Image: Woods Bagot

From the inside, standing high on the top floor, the effect is striking – a massive wall of uniform windows that seem to hang in space, disconnected from the floor.

“Having the curved diamond floor plate and not wanting to have curved expensive cladding we looked at faceting it,” Woods Bagot’s design leader on the project Enzo Caroscio told InDaily DESIGN.

“The diagrid triangle allowed us to create the form we wanted. It allowed us to span the atriums without any primary structure, so the diagrid spans the atriums without having columns in there.

“And it freed up the ground plate to allow it to be a lot more permeable and open for the public, to encourage people to come to the building rather than creating a barrier between the street and the building.”

Concept sketches show the building started life as two side-by-side rectangular office blocks. The design team rotated the southern block slightly, and SAHMRI’s double-diamond form was born. The diamond leaves two huge internal voids along either side of the building; no good if you don’t like heights, but an amazingly serene place to stand and gaze out over the city.

The unique sunshades, which Caroscio observes make the building look like a pinecone, are key to enabling one of the fundamental interior aesthetical choices – a floor plate filled with natural light.

The scales allow lots of light into SAHMRI"s interior. Image: Woods Bagot

The scales allow lots of light into SAHMRI”s interior. Image: Woods Bagot

“We wanted to get a lot of light into the floor plate, so that’s why we’ve got the four-and-a-half metre glass to the façade,” Caroscio said.

“Wanting to get a lot of light in to the floor plate we needed a lot of light at the facade. That created an environment at the facade that’s quite high temperature, so we needed to control that.”

To do that, a system of raised sunshades was decided on – they would let in plenty of light, but block out the heat and glare of direct sun. Once construction is complete, each panel on the building will have its own sunshade.

The Woods Bagot team put the building through a “parametric” computer modelling suite to look at how Adelaide’s sun would fall on the glass throughout the year.

SAHMRI's scales being installed. Photo: Nat Rogers / InDaily

SAHMRI’s scales being installed. Photo: Nat Rogers / InDaily

The software allowed the team to work out the exact size each individual window’s sunshade needed to be to allow in the right amount of sun. Of course, building thousands of individual sunshades would have blown the budget, so they settled for about 25 different shapes.

“They basically transition up the building and across the building, depending on one its orientation, to what’s behind the facade. If it’s behind the atrium we could allow the temperatures of the inside space to get a bit higher because there’s no one actually working up against the facade. So we can open up the sunshade more.

“Where it’s up against the workplace, where people might be working up against the glass, we needed shading, so the sunshade drops a bit more.”

 

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