The Anne McLaren Building

 

Client: Laing O'Rourke
Value: £8 million
Contract Duration: 9 months
Consultant: Arup

The design and ventilation distribution for this new build biomedical research facility was very similar to that of the Francis Crick Institute in that it needed a significant amount of containment stainless steel ductwork with a meticulous testing requirement. The Anne McLaren building is located in the heart of Cambridge University’s world-renowned biomedical research campus and is at the forefront of the latest biomedical research in the United Kingdom and has provided extensive support in the fight against Covid 19. The building was rapidly repurposed in just five weeks in the spring of 2020, a process that would usually take six months. With laboratories using innovative robots to carry out testing at the beginning of the pandemic the Cambridge Covid-19 testing centre has now reached a milestone of 3 million tests processed.