Cities around the world are taking turns producing a new generation of buildings that frame ballet and opera, expressions of art honed and refined from one century to the next. Built templates exist for those institutions. But, how to design for ways of thinking that never even existed five years ago -- where agents of extreme intelligence have cut themselves loose from conventional thinking? Here's where architecture can get interesting.
The Terence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (CCBR) at the University of Toronto is intelligent, unconventional architecture designed through a strong collaboration between local Toronto architects and German gurus of high-technology design. Dedicated to the human genome project, the centre has been invested with light and life-sustaining textures; its bamboo garden can reignite the human spirit on any bitterly cold winter day. With its completion, the identity of Toronto as a thinking place of urbanity is confirmed all over again.
Seven years ago, the Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research existed only on paper. But Cecil Yip and Jim Friesen, former chairs and leading lights at the University of Toronto's department of medicine, believed absolutely in the need to bring a diversity of scientific disciplines together to produce deep research about cells. Three faculties -- medicine, pharmacy and engineering and applied sciences -- agreed to participate, so that biologists might start brainstorming in the same labs along with computer scientists and chemists. The $100-million centre has attracted $60-million in government funding, with the remainder raised through private donations, including lead donor Terrence Donnelly.
How to measure the success of the centre? Watch for its discoveries over the next five years. The goal is for collaborative teams to come up with a higher understanding of how cells operate by themselves or with other organisms. "We want to discover the Achilles heel of a cancer cell," says Brenda Andrews, chair of the Banting and Best department of medical research at U of T and the first director of the CCBR. "If we can understand and reveal the network of a cancer cell, then we could identity how we might use that to treat cancer."
The CCBR triumphs as intelligent architecture because it expresses some unconventional, precedent-setting ideas about the making of mid-size towers while hiding artful decisions that are invisible to the eye. While it's surely impossible to itemize the thousands of decisions that produced the exhilarating architecture at the centre, designed by Behnisch, Behnisch + Partner of Stuttgart, Germany in joint venture with the Toronto firm, architectsAlliance, it's important to recognize the ways that intelligent decisions have translated into built form.
The original site, though planted with ash, tulip and cherry trees, was made nasty by the fact that it sat considerably lower than the rest of the medical-sciences buildings to the north and was traversed by a service lane. To seamlessly connect the CCBR to the buildings behind it meant turning the negatives of the site into positives. Early on, even before winning the competition for the centre, design leaders Stefan Behnisch from Stuttgart and Peter Clewes and Adrian DiCastri, partners at architectsAlliance, imagined a plaza angled gently from the sidewalk and then folded up into the new building. With this gesture, Toronto has gained an excellent, south-facing civic space. Granite benches with splayed, steel legs are set dynamically on the plaza, as are groves of white paper birch. The sculpture of a nude figure in motion is an odd addition to an otherwise rigorous composition, leaving one to wonder whether the university's public art commission was placed under undue pressure to accept a well-intended donation. Once inside the building, the granite flooring switches to white terrazzo and there's a climb of 10 stairs to a lush garden of grey giant bamboo. With this gesture, landscape architect Diana Gerrard has provided Toronto with one of its most invigorating winter gardens.
Three elements enliven the architecture: landscape, history and natural light. There is an insertion of greenery, not only at the atrium level, but also on three research floors where plantings of black olive trees and a creeping fig create a sense of moderate climates without resorting to palm trees.
