Lab City CentraleSupélec / OMA

LAB CITY (Written by Sang Kim)

We can presume that a typical plan for a laboratory is very unimaginative due to a large number of functional constraints. Labs are usually planned in a large container box divided by endless corridors which generate a building as a ‘linear bar’. Such a typology usually creates ‘blackout’ urban conditions, with the building acting as a gigantic wall due to its extremely isolated and internalized programs.

What if we imagined instead that labs are congregated as plots in a field following the notion of a gridded city? A city that effortlessly swallows compositions of program and activity, which it changes constantly and independently of each other.

This would offer stable conditions for instable programs that can be reconfigured or intensified as periodically needed.

Re-contextualizing gives the freedom to generate a new typology for learning which cultivates collectivity, plurality and mixity of people within a dense field of knowledge while maintaining the engineering school’s pure functioning as a pedagogic incubator.

In this way, we have formulated the concept of “lab city”. The architecture of “lab city” generates an open urbanity indistinguishable from the engineering school, its creative disorder; framed under a skeleton of concrete roof structure supplanting the homogeneous experience of the campus.

A roof structure incorporated with ETFE allows maximum light transmittance into “lab city”, offering microcosmic comfort for PhD students to conduct and collaborate on experiments.

The main street of “lab city” is activated with a series of public services diagonally carved out from the field which accommodates the daily route of students walking from the existing engineering school, ‘supelec’, to a future metro stop.

In contrast, a multistory platform which houses fitness areas, an administration center and class rooms for first year students winds its way up through and above the field. This stack is conceived of as a ‘cloud’, a radical training machine which offers a complementary condition to the small, intricate knowledge of the horizontal field of “lab city’.