A three-storey, mass-timber office building, the Thornton Building provides workspace for over 200 staff of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute. Completed in summer 2024, the building is an essential part of the masterplan for the Wellcome Genome Campus at Hinxton Hall near Cambridge.
Thornton Building exterior; © Peter Landers
Its flexible offices allow for both indoor and outdoor working, sitting alongside conferencing space, a café and many other facilities. Home to some of the world’s foremost organisations in genomics and computational biology, it is the headquarters of EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) – the clients of the project. The Thornton Building provides workspace for over 200 personnel, together with conferencing facilities and a café.
Sustainable from the start
The three-storey building sits on a sloping site. A single-storey concrete podium houses plant space, retaining structures and an open plan conference space; it also supports two timber-framed CLT floors. An internal glulam-framed atrium is topped by a glulam diagrid roof, with overhangs supported on two or three-storey-high steel columns.Sustainability was one of the client’s main priorities, and this informed the design from Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBStudios) right from the start. They had developed a proposal for a competition, which they further developed after they brought in Ramboll (the project’s structural engineers), and Eurban (the project’s timber subcontractors).
The architects used their own FCBS Carbon tool to calculate the embodied carbon of the design – showing how the structural system, building envelope and structural grid would affect the embodied carbon of the future building. “Timber was definitely the correct material to work with, both environmentally and emotionally,” enthuses Kossy Nnachetta, Partner and Architect at FCBStudios. “Walking around, touching it, watching the natural daylight dance off the naturally textured surface – even smelling it! It gives the building its distinct and beautiful character.”
Collaboration at its core
The Thornton Building creates a much-needed new space for both EMBL-EBI staff and their collaborators to work together. The main form of the building consists of two office wings, constructed with CLT frame and floors, connected by a central spine of glulam beams and columns topped with the diagonally framed glulam roof.
“The building is designed to encourage collaboration. There are different types of work and social spaces around the building for group working, quiet hotdesking, hybrid meetings, large presentations and socialising.”
Greenery and natural light enhance the everyday experience of the buildings for its users.
A legible, logical design
The building’s design moves from social and collaborative spaces to interactive areas, and then to focused spaces. The spaces change as you move through the building, enabling different ways of working. “There are also multi-purpose rooms which could be used for all manner of things: prayer, private conversations, new mothers’ rest rooms or first aid,” Kossy continues. “The Coffee Hub has become a crucial social centre. Tea-points are placed around the floor plan – in open locations rather than tucked away – and there is a visual connection between floors to foster engagement rather than working in isolation.”
Mass timber on a concrete ground floor
While the majority of the building is mass timber, the lower storey is a concrete podium deck. “The site slopes, so there is a concrete retaining wall cut into one side of the site,” explains Ewan Mackie, Principal Structural Engineer at Ramboll. “It made sense to have the ground floor as a concrete podium deck to deal with the waterproofing concerns and to accommodate an open-plan conferencing space. But above that, the primary structure is all timber.”
“The use of concrete for the ground floor is a solution to site constraints and the need to have some wider open spaces at that level; essentially it is a transfer deck. The plant room has large, heavy equipment that wasn’t going to be compatible with a smaller grid.”
A dramatic diagrid roof
“The client was particularly taken by the proposed roof structure,” Ewan tells us. “This ended up being a big part of the overall final design.” The roof incorporates various areas of glazed atrium across the building and a generous number of photovoltaic panels. Along the south and east, the roof expands out, forming an entrance canopy and providing some solar shading on the south.The main roof frame uses diagonal glulam beams that are spanning diagonally with others spanning across. The other roof spans between all of those beams and a CLT deck.
“Both the diamond-frame roof and the canopies were a challenge.” Ewan says. “Dealing with the geometry – managing the connections – the diagonal orientations end up being quite delicate: getting all the interfaces to be just in the right place. In the corners, you don’t want too much to be too perfectly aligned.”
A biophilic design with a human-scale focus
The building is lucky to be surrounded by verdant green landscaping. There are many different natural habitats around the building, including an oxeye daisy meadow, while the River Cam runs nearby. The building’s design ensures that occupants can make the most of this, with generous windows providing natural light and great views. The atrium brings natural daylight deep into the floorplate to the internal offices.
“The ground and first-floor spaces have large group offices looking out at the surrounding landscaping, whilst the smaller offices look out into the biophilic core at the atrium of the building,” points out Kossy.
“Wherever you are in the building, there is a connection to nature.”
Exposed internal timber
Timber was left exposed internally almost everywhere. All the timber soffits are exposed: some have partial ceilings or baffles, but they are not encapsulated. “Some of the walls are encapsulated on one side; those are the walls lining the corridor,” Ewan says. “There needed to be separate compartments for the fire-separation strategy between office and corridor. But the walls in the primary office space are exposed, so when you are looking at the external wall, you see full-height windows with visible timber between them.”
Fire engineers were consulted at different stages and a great deal of work went into the design of connections to make sure that anything with an exposed steel face, such as a connection plate or screw heads, is kept out of harm’s way. “Metal connections generally transfer heat very quickly,” Ewan explains. “A timber connection with a metal plate and screws that is exposed – not otherwise protected or encased – can transmit heat rapidly into the inside of the timber section. Our approach was to conceal as many of the connections as possible within a timber envelope – which also looks neat and tidy.”
“With thin plates that sit within the center of a timber beam, there might be only a small gap at the top, and that can be filled with a fire sealant. Or if you have a section of slab that is sitting on a steel shelf angle, that steel shelf angle can be recessed slightly within the slab and covered with a cloaking piece of timber: the timber insulates the steel from heating up so quickly.”
In addition to the exposed CLT and glulam, cork flooring is used wherever possible, whilst wood wool was used for the acoustic baffles.
Timber floor slabs
Timber floors often present challenges in terms of vibration. “Comfort of the office users is an issue here,” Ewan says. “Occupants don’t appreciate this issue until the second there’s an element of bounce to a floor. There is a board on the flooring to provide damping and we carried out quite a few iterations of vibration modeling to make sure it was stiff enough.”
Ewan points out that understanding the sources of vibration and human perception is key to resolving these issues. This requires identifying the activities likely to give rise to vibration and where they are, relative to the occupants who’ll experience them. “It’s about considering exactly where the floor is sensitive and understanding which areas are likely to be a problem, such as the position of corridors relative to banks of desks,” Ewan explains.
DNA in its design
The Thornton Building takes its name from Dame Janet Thornton – one of the world’s leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. The building’s façade features a striking bespoke panel system of perforated aluminium (provided by Proteus).
At the main entrance – in recognition of the work carried out within – the perforated panels have been punched with a full DNA sequence that illustrates the impact that even the smallest DNA mutations can have on an individual. It creates a direct visual connection between the building and its scientific purpose. It’s symptomatic of the attention to detail exhibited throughout the building. Its collaborative design is always focused on the building’s users, dedicated to providing a healthy workspace for engaged collaboration and inspiring ideas.
