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A Rafael Vinoly Stem Cell Lab that Curves and Swoops with its Site

Rafael Vinoly’s, FAIA, newest project, the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) opened last month. This stem cell research lab is placed on a demanding site: a steeply sloping forest hillside. <a href='http://www.rvapc.com/'>Rafael Vinoly Architects</a> responded by creating a sinuous, serpentine building that wraps around the hillside and makes use of every foot of available space. All images courtesy of Bruce Damonte.

The building is supported by steel trusses set in concrete piers, minimizing site impact and incorporating seismic base isolation systems to absorb earthquake forces. It’s targeting LEED Gold certification.

The laboratory is divided into four split levels, each stepping down a half-story as the building wraps around the hillside. Each level is topped by an office cluster and a landscaped roof deck with wildflowers and plants. Visible from the surrounding campus buildings’ upper floors, the terraces create a welcoming transitional space where the dense campus meets the forest.

The green roof terraces offer the campus a public, outdoor amenity.

Just as the building itself wraps around the hillside, a series of exterior ramps and stairs wrap around the building, thus taking advantage of the temperate Northern California climate and providing continuous circulation between all levels. Beyond the curvilinear shape of the building, this is perhaps the project’s most expressive touch. It’s unusual for a building type as typically buttoned-up as research labs to put their internal circulation infrastructure on the outside, and the move references previous experimental inside-out architecture like Renzo Piano, Hon. FAIA, and Richard Rogers’, Hon. FAIA, <a href='http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Centre_Pompidou.html'>Pompidou Centre</a> in Paris.

To promote collaboration, the laboratories occupy a horizontal open-floor plan, with a flexible, custom-designed casework system that enables the rapid reconfiguration of research programs. The Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building is the headquarters for <a href='http://stemcell.ucsf.edu/'>The Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF</a>. The Center encompasses 125 labs made up of scientists exploring the earliest stages of animal and human development. <em>AIArchitect</em> profiled a previous Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research <a href='http://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek08/0620/0620p_lab.cfm'>project</a> at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Inside the building, the transitions between the split levels are designed as hubs of activity. Break rooms and stairs located at these junctures increase the potential for chance interaction, a goal for promoting the cross-pollination of ideas among the different disciplines of researchers, a common theme in contemporary laboratory design.

The green roof terraces moderate the transition between the San Francisco cityscape and the adjacent forest, make the building less of an impenetrable barrier between the two.

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