The Neural Module was built in the courtyard of the Blizzard laboratory building at Queen Mary University of London, a 2005 work by Will Alsop in Whitechapel. The module is designed for scientific "shows", various workshops, laboratory experiments, debates, film screenings and exhibitions. Olsop managed to take part in the ceremony of its foundation in April last year, and a month later, on May 12, 2018, the architect was gone.
The new building continues the idea of the surrounding complex, in the interior of which there are four modules resembling certain cells in shape. Three of them serve as meeting rooms for employees, and the fourth accommodates the educational "Cage Center", which deals with the "informal" education of children and adults, primarily in the field of biology and medicine. It was this institution, which started operating in 2009, that needed additional space, so in 2010 Alsop took up the project of the fifth cell-module - a nervous one, that is, a neuron.
The difficulty was that it was necessary to preserve a free pedestrian passage through the courtyard and the complex as a whole, and during construction - not to interfere in any way with the work of 400 researchers in the laboratories of the underground level, including those under the site of future construction. Therefore, the cage received three supports, placed on the points of the basement tier capable of bearing the additional load (and therefore its weight is limited to 25 tons). You can get inside the "Neural Module" (height - 10 m, length - 23 m) from the second floor of the Blizzard building, via a galvanized steel bridge.
The module is a monoblock with a supporting shell - this is the principle used to design vehicles. The casing consists of corten: 13 large "panels" of complex profile were manufactured at the factory and delivered to the site, and because of their size, a police escort was sometimes required during transportation. Initially, the panels were supposed to be larger, and their shape was simpler, close to a triangle, but the need to reduce the budget by paying workers' labor required to minimize their participation, in this case, the scope of the task for welders. The very efficient insulation of the module has kept heating and cooling costs to a minimum.
The three pillars and the “neck” of the module leading to the bridge denote axons - the main processes of the nerve cell, and the fiber-optic “hairs” with LED illumination are short processes, dendrites.
