Virus Reference Laboratory
This extension to the Virus Reference Laboratory was built on a restricted site in University College Dublin between the main laboratory and Ardmore House on the upper part of the University College Dublin campus at Belfield outside Dublin. Although small in scale, the project plays a significant role in the relationship between the central university buildings and the surrounding landscape, and, in particular, the lake directly below it. Quite different in shape and materials, the project is one of a series of new pavilions designed to both support and challenge the ideas of architecture in landscape that permeated the original campus design in the 1960’s. Designed as a place of work and interchange with offices on the upper floor and a laboratory, canteen and meeting facility on the ground floor, the pavilion is everywhere concerned with being in landscape and with the interpretation of landscape. It has extensive views to the wider grounds: at a local level, one side is framed by a rational triangular shape on the ground plane- the inner edge is intimately tied around a small Japanese garden. The plan is simple: open space with a coloured core like the nucleus of a cell at one end which can be glimpsed in the round as one moves around the building; there is also a canted link corridor which connects it back to the main laboratory. Additional height to parapets gives it a cube-like proportional muscularity: the elevations are clad in a skin of abstract interlocking and overlapping shapes in glazing and timber panels which project and recede from the main surface. The Virus Reference Laboratory extension was completed in 2003
