Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge University, by Stanton Williams

1830年，植物学教授、查尔斯·达尔文的导师约翰·史蒂文斯·亨斯洛在给剑桥大学的同事们发表的一场充满激情的演讲中宣称:“一个人带着六个花盆对植物学的进步可能比一个人带着20或30英亩的花园做出的努力要多。”

“But the larger the number of living species that are cultivated in a Botanic Garden, the greater will be the facilities afforded to us all; not merely for systematic improvement, but for anatomical and other experimental researches essential to the progress of general physiology.”

这是一个激进的主张。对亨斯洛来说，植物园是一个研究植物本身基本结构和特性的地方——这是一个新奇的追求。在此之前的5年里，他一直在努力争取扩大16公顷的土地，以取代大学贫瘠的物理花园，这是一块可以追溯到1762年的小块土地，在那里，医学院的学生们只学习草药的药用。当时一位到访的巴伐利亚教授将其描述为“大约五英亩非常贫瘠的土地”——对于一个新兴学科的世界领先研究中心来说，这完全不够。

Credited with inventing the “practical class” and its accompanying “demonstration bench”, Henslow was a progressive teacher and encouraged his students to go out and make their own observations from nature. To him, the garden was an extension of the laboratory. His plan, finally realised on a plot of land a mile south of the city centre, still stands today as a grade II* listed heritage site. A “gardenesque” composition, combining both specimen plants and composed landscapes, it is home to clusters of exotic trees and a complex series of herbaceous “systematics beds”, all laid out according to his theory of species, bisected by a long east-west axis and ringed by a meandering loop.

One hundred and eighty years after Henslow secured this site, it now bears a gleaming stone temple to his legacy: the £82 million Sainsbury Laboratory, a building solely dedicated to “elucidating the regulatory systems underlying plant development”. We have come a long way from students smelling herbs on a patch of bad ground.

We have come a long way from students smelling herbs on a patch of bad ground

Sited in the north-east corner of the university’s botanic garden – in the back-of-house working world of sheds and tractors – this 11,000sq m research facility does a remarkable job of pretending it is not actually there at all. Accessed from an unlikely passage off Bateman Street to the north, and screened from the garden to the south-west by a mature grove of oaks and horse chestnuts, it hovers stealthily low in the landscape, not even reaching the roofline of the adjacent terraced houses.

斯坦顿威廉姆斯(Stanton Williams)的主管加文•亨德森(Gavin Henderson)表示:“这是一个非常敏感的地方。”我们走在新建的围墙入口大道上，左边几米远的地方是一排马厩，右边是一组多管隧道后面的挂牌花园景观。他说:“我们真的努力让这座建筑低调，三分之一的空间都在地下。”

The narrow linear path screens our view of the building until it opens out into an expansive court, a 25m-wide square of York stone, planted with a grid of ginkgo trees. This courtyard brings us on axis with the full power of the building’s northern elevation: an unbroken 70m-long band of slender stone columns, marching along the first floor in a bold trabeated frieze. For those expecting a rickety old shed, or perhaps a compost heap, it is a startling sight.

Framed between sharp slabs of pale in-situ concrete, this perforated strip of honey-coloured limestone fins – named “pierre de soleil” for its buttery warmth in sunlight – appears to float across the width of the building. It seems only to be supported at its eastern end on a 3m-tall base of the same stone, with which it sits flush. Conceived as a monolithic plinth, this base is gradually recessed and eroded beneath the cantilevered upper storey as it progresses around the building, opening up completely towards the garden, and sometimes dissolving into a bed of gravel of the same colour. A third of the way along the northern front, it folds back into a glazed entrance, to which the entry court slopes down like a tilted tectonic plate, so that its stone surface extends deep into the building’s lobby. This is a simple series of moves, but it forms a powerful entrance sequence, using subtle shifts in the landscape to bring you from the street edge into the centre of the facility with maximum effect.

这个宏伟的石头容器坐落在相关设施的更广阔有序的景观中，每一个都在植物学研究过程中发挥着自己的特定作用，“有点像一个工作的厨房花园，”亨德森说。建筑的东面是一个曲曲弯弯的胶合板木棚子——大学的植物生长设施，由RH伙伴建筑事务所于2005年设计，在棚子之外是一个新的温室综合体，在一个下沉的控制生长室的顶部凸起。坐落在建筑师定制的混凝土基座上的专有铝框架玻璃工棚的音调节奏令人信服——“这是我们自己的乡村庙宇，”亨德森开玩笑说——这是劳吉尔对隔壁复杂的实验室建筑的版本。

The language of permanence and flimsiness is elevated in the laboratory, itself conceived as a robust masonry shell, with secondary elements slotted into the frame. From the outside, it has none of the pretentions of a “flexible structure”, none of the wiry system-built language of so many modular scientific buildings. Instead, it is a wilfully monumental masonry box, but one, it turns out, that will stand plenty of adaptation within.

Entering this grown-up temple, the tilted entrance mat leads past a fully glazed wall to the central lecture theatre – the transparent forum-like heart of the building – to what Henderson describes as the “internal street”. An L-shaped space, with double-height voids cut through to provide glimpses of the laboratories above, it accommodates a dining area along one wing, while a stately, 20m-long timber staircase rises through the other. Framing two sides of an open central courtyard, this space is the social core, designed to facilitate interaction between the community of 120 scientists that will eventually be based here. The stair’s long treads force you to slow your pace, and its generous width allows two people to walk and talk, side by side, deep in botanical dialogue.

Upstairs, the social spaces continue, with a series of “study box” cubby holes set back from the lofty 6m-high space, lining the western facade of the southern wing. Modelled on Louis Kahn’s Exeter Library study carrels, these boxes are elegantly expressed on the elevation by recessed iroko panels set within crisp, double-order aluminium frames (which also serve to hide the structural steelwork propping the cantilevered slab). They are alluring spaces, but there is a touch of the first-class lounge about them, in their leather seating and oak-veneered panelling.

There is a touch of the first-class lounge about the leather seating and panelling in the ’study boxes’

Across the stair void from the study boxes, slightly raised up behind full-height glazing, lie the laboratories themselves – a visual proximity required, says Henderson, “because scientists never like to be too far from their labs”. These are generous spaces, flooded with natural daylight by curvaceous light wells that seem to mimic the profile of a scientific flask or bell jar, rising to 6m and shedding an even wash across the bespoke epoxy-resin lab benches. These are the kinds of rooms more often found in art galleries than research buildings, with an airy spaciousness and open aspect towards the garden, contrary to the usual model of a hermetically sealed prefab box.

实验室后面是一层层的支撑空间，由一条连续的立管分隔开来——在现场外制造并吊运到位——以及一条连接12名“主要研究人员”朝外办公室的走廊，以及进一步的实用房间。纵观整个建筑，几乎没有一个空间没有日光照射，无论是通过立面的窗户，还是通过凹入的屋顶，流通被朝向的交叉视图精心打断，避免了这种规模的大多数机构设施通常的warren式性质。在这些实用的区域，墙壁采用了柱状结构，偶尔也采用砌块结构，以适应未来的变化——一个灵活的内部结构掩盖了整体的砖石外壳。

The same organisation is repeated in the perpendicular wing, with open-plan write-up areas located at each end, along with two larger meeting rooms. Everything is on one level to encourage a sense of community, with continual views across the L-shaped plan certainly aiding the impression of a single open space – and, Henderson adds, “because we were told that scientists don’t do stairs”.

The southern wing leads out to a large stone terrace, the roof of a public café below that partially frames the third side of the central court, with views towards the botanic gardens and back into the facility. Conceived as a continuous concrete plane, this slab rises up to form a wall to the east, before wrapping over to become an overhanging ceiling, in a rather mannered move – less successful in its desire for public-facing novelty than the restrained clarity of the other elevations. From this level, steps lead down into the court, a slightly over-scaled stone space, planted with another grid of trees – this time olives, in keeping with the landscape concept of progressing from the grove of prehistoric ginkgo to this most cultivated of plants. Henderson likens these spaces to Darwin’s “thinking path”, the circular route he would walk in the grounds of Down House, deep in thought. There is a clear intention that the collegiate nature of the building’s design will aid both the social and intellectual working atmosphere of the place, with plenty of different routes and places to stop and talk.

Since the building has yet to be occupied, save for a couple of industrious researchers, these large open spaces can’t help but feel slightly barren, like the deserted forecourt of a grand hacienda. That said, although not strictly public, this central square has been proving popular with mothers and toddlers, who come to marvel in at William Pye’s water features, sparkling illuminated jets set into the ground, with any risk of getting wet safely removed behind glass. Let’s hope the trespassing continues.

Mothers and toddlers come to marvel at William Pye’s water features

One area that is already receiving much enthusiastic use is the public café, beautifully positioned to look on to the newly landscaped lawn of Cory Lodge, a listed Baillie Scott building that is now home to the garden’s horticultural team. A line of pleached lime trees extends the linear figure of the laboratory into the landscape, providing shade for the café tables. Meanwhile, low hedges frame the lawn, but retain a sense of permeability into the garden proper. A series of ground-floor rooms have also been provided at the end of the western wing for the garden staff, including a new mess room with its own secluded terrace.

Beneath all this, and explaining the apparent simplicity of it all, lie the sprawling bowels of the building, a whole floor humming with plant – a move that has left the rooftop enviously crisp and free from clutter. This level will also soon house the herbarium, rolling stacks of plant specimens – including the very samples Darwin brought back from the five-year voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s – safely secured behind a series of regulated antechambers.

As we leave the building, Henderson attributes the success of the project – which was impressively procured through a design-and build-contract – to the persistent push for quality from all sides, describing the process as “an amazing example of patronage” on the part of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, a branch of the Sainsbury empire, and encouraged by the enthusiasm of John Parker, recently retired director of the botanic gardens. Competing for world-class researchers against other international institutes – including those Californian idylls, such as the Salk, that enjoy views out on to the Pacific Ocean – this building had to be designed as part of the draw, in the uphill battle of beach vs lawn, sun vs rain, Louis Kahn vs Stanton Williams.

也许有些地方的结果有点过于圆滑，但在大学严格的标准的帮助下，以及承包商Kier无可挑剔的建筑质量，建筑师成功地使它成为一个令人印象深刻的全球竞争者，打造了亨斯洛会感到骄傲的持久遗产。