Last week I had a chance to watch “My Architect” an Oscar nominated documentary (from 2003) by Nathaniel Kahn about the work and life of the architect Louis Kahn. The movie does a very good job of giving the audience a sense for Louis Kahn’s personality, a sense for what he expected out of architecture and his dilemma – of wanting the conventional measures of success and yet not being able to take the conventional steps that will take him there. Though as the name suggests, more than anything the documentary is about a son’s search for closure. It’s his attempt to accept an often absent father -who had two other families- as he was, with no more anger or blame.
However, what makes Louis Kahn relevant for these pages is his experience with designing research buildings. His Richards Medical Laboratory in Pennsylvania seems to have gotten some negative reviews from the scientists who actually work in them, whereas the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA is praised by most everyone. The main difference between the two projects might be that on the latter he worked more closely with an engineer who had a better understanding of what scientists needed from these buildings in terms of functionality and who could perhaps better balance Louis Kahn’s, focus on form. I can’t say that I’m a big fan of Louis Kahn’s works’ often cold and austere exterior, but if it means a lot of natural light and an uninterrupted view of the ocean from my office window, why not? Despite some of his ideas which seemed unreasonable at the time, his use of natural light inside almost all of his buildings must have had some role, along with the green incentive, in the concept being adopted in many of the research spaces designed later on.
As anyone who has worked in an office/cubicle/lab hours on end without seeing daylight can attest to, the sun is our friend (unless you are doing immunofluorescence). Similarly, to say that anyone will benefit from an aesthetically pleasing work environment might be stating the obvious.
However, the opposite is also easy to argue. Jon Cohen, in a decade old article for Science Magazine, summarizes the ideas thrown out in a panel discussion on the subject: it can be said that a good scientist is a good scientist and the color of the walls or the number of windows is irrelevant. Hence spending millions of dollars on designer buildings is an unnecessary expense. Then the question becomes are the good scientists more likely to go to work in places where color of the walls are to their liking? Here is a more fundamental question Jon Cohen poses: Can a good scientist become better, more creative and productive in a well-designed environment? For one I certainly agree that the quality of the workspace reflects positively on the work produced. Sure, quality work can be produced at any location where the necessary minimums are met, but unless the work in question is writing a heart-wrenching eulogy after a molecule, being in poorly designed labs won’t necessarily push the scientist over the edge for designing an elegant experiment. Judging from the push towards the designer research buildings of the last 15 years, there must be an economist out there who has already done the cost/benefit analysis for expensive buildings and decided it is worth the trouble.
Albeit a little dated like the previous, this article, also by Jon Cohen, nicely covers the ‘designer lab’ trend.
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