The Wellcome Trust Genome Campus is set in the idyllic grounds of the Hinxton Hall estate, south of Cambridge. The Campus plays host to scientific research at the Sanger Institute and European Bioinformatics Institute, as well as to courses and conferences, and a publicly-accessible nature reserve.

The Shared Facilities building on the campus includes space for the different research groups at the Campus to use shared meeting space, and café facilities.  It plays an important role in encouraging interaction between the scientists and other staff.

The building has a 10m high glazed outer shell within which sits a two storey structure comprising two ‘boxes’ which are skewed to both each other and the main outer shell.  The upper box provides meeting rooms with highly acoustic rating.  The lower box provides the food storage, preparation and sales area with seating in the double height space between the box and the glazing.

The upper box is formed with a structural stud framing system and sits on the concrete upper slab of the steel framing to the lower box.  The skewing of the boxes results in large cantilevers in the steelwork at the corners.  The lower box sits on the original insitu concrete floors over a basement car park.  As the columns to the lower box do not relate to the grid of the car park below transfer beams are provided.

The building structure was modelled in scia and drawn in Revit and the 3D capabilities of both these packages allowing the complex geometrical arrangements to be accurately understood and coordinated.