The London Centre for Nanotechnology is a joint enterprise between UCL and Imperial College which aims to put British science at the centre of this increasingly important field. The eight storey building at 17–19 Gordon Street in Bloomsbury, contains a range of laboratory and office facilities designed to take advantage of the tools which the microelectronics revolution has made available to all branches of the sciences.

The laboratory spaces, including a 200 square metre clean room, have exceptionally rigorous specifications with tightly controlled and stable environmental conditions. Much of the building houses highly sensitive instruments for the preparation and investigation of nanoscale structures and materials. The fifth floor contains a mix of cellular offices and a large open plan space for research and computational modelling, within a naturally-lit glazed rooftop space. On the floors below, additional labs require widely varying internal conditions, from fully air-conditioned ‘black box’ spaces to day-lit observation rooms.

The base is clad in Portland Stone with large glazed openings and white clay bricks facing the rear courtyard elevation. The central portion consists of a ‘layered’ façade comprising an inner stainless steel rainscreen clad wall, and an outer layer of perforated stainless steel ‘brise soleil’.

The building seeks to exploit the material characteristics of the double skin environmental façade to create a moiré pattern – moiré patterns being one of the tools first used by scientists to measure particles at the atomic scale.

Client: UCL and Imperial College

Construction value: £12,906,380

Completion: November 2005