The Discovery Centre Cambridge Biomedical Campus building design, DISC English architecture images
The Discovery Centre Cambridge Biomedical Campus
4 September 2025
Design: Herzog & de Meuron / BDP
Location: DISC – Cambridge Biomedical Campus for AstraZeneca, Cambridge, England, UK
Photos © Hufton+Crow
The Discovery Centre by Herzog & de Meuron / BDP, England
Jury citation:
Designing a medical research facility on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus for AstraZeneca would be a tough technical challenge for any architectural practice. Lengthy delays caused by the pharmaceutical company’s need to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic added to the project’s complicated history following the architects’ success in the international design competition held back in 2012.
Echoing the shape of its site, the scheme adopts an innovative curved triangular plan that helps to create a stronger street presence than typically found in science parks. In the centre, serviced by a well-positioned canteen, is a generously proportioned, publicly accessible courtyard (referencing Cambridge college quadrangles). Here, on warm days, the facility’s staff can choose a place to sit, depending on the level of sun or shade required.
Echoing the sawtooth roofline, the strict geometry of the continuously serrated glass façade offers a variety of breakout spaces along the inner and outer perimeter walls for meetings or conversations. The corners of the triangle serve as open-plan offices. The rest of the space in the three above-ground floors is organised around three paired sets of research laboratories which create and test medicines and vaccines using advanced robotics.
These laboratories have full-height interior glass walls so everyone can see what is going on – and yet are also highly secure. Cleverly inserted interconnecting corridors allow scientists to move from one lab to another.
Beneath the ground is a deep two-storey basement where a lot of specialised equipment undoubtedly adds to the substantial overall cost required to provide a suitably state-of-the-art scientific facility. Fourteen separate heating control systems enable the adjustment of temperature within the different areas of this elegant and functional building. Heating and cooling are supplied by a remote ground-source heat pump – claimed to be Europe’s largest – on the edge of the science park.
One would forgive the design team if they concentrated on the science alone, yet there is more than a nod to placemaking here. The building’s shape forms a generous triangular interface between it and the adjacent hospitals – the Royal Papworth and Addenbrooke’s – that it ultimately serves. Visually and ecologically attractive, the space includes a green wall and a range of uncommon native apple trees among its topiary and grass. The overall effect is that of welcome on a campus which is otherwise businesslike and workaday.
Photographs © Hufton+Crow
Stirling Prize 2025 Shortlist building + architects
The Discovery Centre Cambridge Biomedical Campus, England images / information received 040925
Location: Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Cambridgeshire, south east England, UK.
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