The Biosphere at Newcastle Helix
Award-winning life sciences facility located in one of the UK’s largest city centre innovation hubs based on the former Scottish & Newcastle Brewery site in Newcastle.
Services (6)
Sectors
Location
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Client
Newcastle City Council
Architect
Ryder Architecture
The Biosphere, a 7,200m² bio-science centre, is the first independent Newcastle City Council building at Newcastle Helix. The centre provides flexible laboratory and office accommodation for a range of bio-science, primary life science and healthcare companies, enabling them to carry out research and product development and support innovation and growth within the sector. The 24-acre Helix site has become an exemplar in sustainable urban development, attracting leading-edge science and technology organisations to a new community environment.
The building has been designed to be as flexible as possible and cater for the varying needs of ‘start-up’ pioneering businesses, facilitating their growth as their ventures flourish.
Gordon Reid, Partner, commented, "To develop a building that met the client’s brief and budget required a fully integrated design approach. To achieve this, the whole design team co-located to a shared design space for two weeks during Stage 2 and Stage 3. This allowed integrated solutions to be developed and tested quickly. Each discipline produced their concept design in a 3D Revit environment, which allowed a fully coordinated 3D design to be developed very early in the process."
A flexible, modular approach was applied to the heating and cooling design utilising fan coil units, incorporating sufficient capacity for a wide range of cooling requirements and enabling efficient turn-down.
