Designed to look like a cell from the outside and to contain structures that resemble intracellular organelles and molecules, the future building of biomedical research institute in Chengdu, China, was designed by Shuguang Zhang, a bioengineer and scientist at MIT, and an architecture major undergrad Sloan Kulper. In the first picture, one can see the building from the outside. In the second, endosomes and mitochondria-like pools inside. The third picture features bridges, representing X and Y chromosomes.
In the class, Zhang frequently discusses the striking similarities between architecture and biological structures, he said. “Nature has produced abundant magnificent, intricate and fine molecular and cellular structures through billions of years of molecular selection and evolution.
“These invisible molecular and cellular structures cannot be seen by the naked eye, but can only be observed with the most sophisticated scientific tools, such as X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance, or modeled with advanced computers. But if they can be amplified billions of times as in a building, then these molecular structures can be seen, touched and admired. At that large scale, they can also be very educational for people of all ages,” Zhang said.
According to Zhang, the pioneering design for the cell-shaped building was inspired by “elegantly folded protein structures and their simple and beautiful structural motifs. The cell-shaped building attempts to combine the architecture and the biology structures,” he said…
Together, the international architecture team “developed sketches and models while simultaneously studying cellular structures that had formal similarities to the spaces we were designing. We worked with images of proteins, membranes and organelles alongside photos and textbook images of glazing systems and cantilevers,” Kulper said.
The final plan calls for a research and laboratory facility with six floors and a crystal-shaped lecture hall with a crystal diffraction pattern ceiling, full of various biology motifs, to be built for about $12 million – more than twice the current cost of a more traditional design in China, yet a small fraction of the cost of building in the United States…
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