[Editors] Three at MIT conceive cell-shaped building

[Elizabeth Thomson]

MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
Phone: 617-253-2700
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www

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Three at MIT conceive cell-shaped building
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For Immediate Release
MONDAY, AUG. 7, 2006
Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-258-5402
Email: thomson at mit.edu

IMAGES AVAILABLE

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--An innovative cell-shaped building will house a new 
biomedical research institute in Chengdu, China, thanks to an unusual 
crossdisciplinary collaboration between Shuguang Zhang, a 
world-renowned bioengineer and scientist at MIT, his former student, 
architecture major Sloan Kulper, and computer science and electrical 
engineering major Audrey Roy.

Kulper (S.B. 2003) and Roy (S.B. 2005) designed the cell-shaped 
building for the Institute for Nanobiomedical Technology and Membrane 
Biology in Chengdu, China, the regional capital of Sichuan province 
in southwestern China. The proposed new facility will contain 170,000 
square feet of laboratory, research and meeting spaces; it is slated 
for construction over the next three years. The building is intended 
to look like a cell from the outside and to include an assortment of 
forms inspired by molecular biology inside.

Zhang, associate director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering, 
will serve as founding advisor of the new Nanobiomedical Institute, 
to be sited at Chengdu's Sichuan University, where Zhang received his 
undergraduate degree in biochemistry.
Zhang met Kulper in 2002, when he took Zhang's course, "Molecular 
Structure of Biological Materials: Structure, Function and 
Self-assembly."

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.

Kulper said the design of the building also arose from the pioneering 
spirit he discovered among life scientists and biological engineers. 
"They are always working at the threshold of understanding," Kulper 
said.

"When I took Shuguang's course, I was thrilled to learn that 
structural biologists had developed such an amazing language for 
describing new and complex forms. Also, structural biology is 
basically concerned with the sort of geometries that architects and 
designers often work with, though on a completely different scale. 
It's a very visual field that communicates more through illustration 
than through symbol," Kulper said.

The seeds of Kulper's involvement in the Sichuan University project 
began in conversations he had with Zhang, a known admirer of 
architecture, during the year in which he took Zhang's course. Zhang 
encouraged Kulper both to apply principles of scientific research to 
his work in architecture -- "Explore the unknowns and navigate the 
uncharted territories," he urged -- and to spend time in Zhang's 
laboratory learning about bioengineering.

The next year, Zhang contacted Kulper with the news that he was now 
the founding advisor of a new research institute at Sichuan 
University.

Kulper said, "Zhang offered me the opportunity to develop concepts 
for the building, which, as a biological research building, would 
give us an opportunity to design for a client that would appreciate 
details that referenced biological concepts. I started work on 
sketches immediately once he had given me some basic information 
regarding the functional requirements of the building as well as 
photos of the site in Chengdu."

Zhang said he challenged Kulper with incorporating "as many biology 
motifs as possible" into his design and with using realistic 
construction materials.
Zhang then sent Kulper to spend three summer months in Beijing with 
Roy, where they collaborated on a preliminary design for the building 
with architects at Tsinghua University's Architectural Design and 
Research Institute. Roy, currently a software engineer at Silicon 
Valley startup Sharpcast, Inc., designed and programmed "iQuarium," 
an interactive media installation on fish fluid dynamics, when she 
was at MIT.

Kulper characterized the collaboration with his Chinese design 
teammates as a "highly gratifying, very hybridized process."

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.

On the exterior design of the building, Roy commented, "Bay windows 
are scattered throughout the surface of the building, just like 
proteins in a cell membrane. They serve as convenient meeting places 
attached to both laboratories and offices."

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.

Kulper hopes to visit the construction site in Chengdu in time to 
catch some of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, he said.

In the meantime, Zhang has produced a book on the design process for 
the cell-shaped building. On viewing the renderings of the building, 
Institute Professor Phillip Sharp commented, "The building is very 
interesting. I have always wondered what it would be like working 
within the cell."

Ingemar Ernberg, a tumor biologist from Sweden's Karolinska 
Institute, not only immediately arranged for a Swedish architect to 
visit Zhang but also invited Zhang to give a talk to a group of 
Swedish architects.

As Zhang wrote in the preface of the conceptual design book, "It is 
hoped that the first molecular bio-architectural design will further 
stimulate many diverse architectural designs that are inspired from 
biology structures."

--END--

Written by Sarah Wright, MIT News Office

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Elizabeth A. Thomson
Assistant Director, Science & Engineering News
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
News Office, Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
617-258-5402 (ph); 617-258-8762 (fax)
<thomson at mit.edu>

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www>
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