Molecular Bonds

Molecular Bonds
Molecular Bonds

Video: Molecular Bonds

Video: Molecular Bonds
Video: Atomic Hook-Ups - Types of Chemical Bonds: Crash Course Chemistry #22 2024, March
Anonim

The new building, at first glance, follows the "canon" already familiar for the campus complex: the laboratory buildings forming a rectangular plan surround the courtyard. But the difficulty in the case of the NanoSystems Institute is that a very small area was allocated for it. The University of California Los Angeles campus is the most densely built campus of nine in various cities in the state, and a third of its total building area is dedicated to car parking. In the case of the new institute, its site was bordered by a huge multi-storey garage.

At the same time, the university needed at least 11 floors of laboratories and offices to house this scientific organization, one of four created at the initiative of the US government and engaged in the introduction of nanotechnology into production. The logical solution was to construct a tower-like building, but in this case, according to Vignoli, the chances of "improvised" collaboration of specialists working in different laboratories and departments would be minimal. Researchers would have no place to meet and their productivity would decline.

Therefore, the architect made the decision to erect a horizontally oriented building of the new institute with vast public spaces - corridors and courtyards, where researchers could exchange views.

Therefore, Vignoli divided the building into two parts - an eight-story (half hidden underground) and a three-story one, which is raised above the parking lot on rectangular brick “towers” that mark the corners of both buildings of the institute. The connection between the two buildings is carried out both through corridors passing along the perimeter of the building, and through a network of "bridges" crossing the courtyard of the complex in different directions. Compared to the discreet, plastic-paneled facades of the buildings, this courtyard looks like a fragment of a futuristic metropolis; and it is on the ramps of these "air corridors" that scientific links should arise between different departments of a research institution.

Thus, of the entire building, only the eight-story building "stands firmly on the ground", and the other three parts of the square of the institute building are raised above it. The architect sees this as a great opportunity for a painless expansion of the complex in the future: three more laboratory wings can be built above the parking lot, just like the existing three-storey one.

However, the only element of the project that hints at its hidden merits and unusual twists from the outside is the one overlooking the so-called. The "Science Courtyard" of the campus is a ceramic-tiled disc of the Institute's audience. It breaks the symmetry of the building's facades and serves as an identification mark for the main entrance to the building.