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The
Science of Togetherness
The
first new building on Science Hill since the 1960s is all about
linkages.
by
Bruce Fellman
October 1993
When Michael McKinnell,
who, in 1987, was architectural adviser to President Benno C. Schmidt
Jr., got his first look at Science Hill and its eclectic collection
of buildings, from the 1923 neo-Gothic Sterling Chemistry Laboratory
to Philip Johnson's 1965 Kline Biology Tower, his reaction to the
scene was a common one. "I had a sense of enormous anticlimax,"
McKinnell explains. "I saw the Tower and was drawn to the top
of the hill, only to find that there was a gaping hole in the composition."
McKinnell, whose credits
include City Hall in Boston and the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in Cambridge, was called on to fill the gap, and he did
so by designing a new building to serve as home for the rapidly
growing department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry. This
month, with a flurry of speeches and receptions, critics and scientists
alike will have a chance to judge how well McKinnell has succeeded,
as Yale officially welcomes the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Center
for Molecular and Structural Biology.
The Bass Center, a three-story
brick structure, cost $33 million, of which $20 million was donated
by Perry Bass, '37, '93DHL, and his wife. It is the first building
to rise on Science Hill since Kline's completion, and it eliminates
the void in the Kline courtyard by linking the Josiah Willard Gibbs
Research Laboratories, a pale green, high-modernist box completed
in 1955, with Sterling. If its planners are right, the investment
in a new building even as Yale struggles to come up with the funds
to maintain its existing structures will forge as many scientific
links as it does architectural ones.
"The basic entity
of life is the cell, and there's absolutely no way to describe its
function except in a molecular fashion," says Robert Macnab,
who chairs a department that has its intellectual roots in biology,
chemistry, and physics. Molecule by molecule, atom by atom, MB&B
scientists, using the high-tech tools of modern biology, are chronicling
life's chemistry. The work ranges from Joan Steitz's pioneering
studies in genetics to Robert Shulman's recent discoveries of techniques
to make molecular maps of human thought. Other members of the department,
like Lynne Regan, are probing how proteins work, while Axel Brunger
refines computer software that enables researchers to create images
of molecules. Steve Smith is studying the intricate chemical ballet
that enables humans and other animals to see at night. And William
McGinnis probes the genes of fruit flies for clues to the secrets
of human development. "You start off with a single fertilized
egg and wind up with a complicated, beautifully functioning animal,"
says McGinnis. "People have wondered for thousands of years
how this transformation from disorder to order takes place."
Rarified
as such work may sound, it has far-reaching implications.
Donald Engelman, whose work also focuses on proteins, is, like many
of his colleagues, excited about the economic dividends that the
molecular approach may generate. "We're very likely looking
at the future of the U.S. economy, the future of health care, and
the future of agriculture," says the researcher, who this fall
returns full-time to the laboratory after administrative stints
as MB&B chairman and acting dean of the College. "Very
grand things may emerge from this work."
But according to Macnab,
the main justification for the Bass Center is not merely promising
research. It's also sociology. "The new building provides us
with a more pleasant, efficient, and, most important, a more interactive
working environment," the chairman notes. "We've always
felt very fragmented."
Indeed. Since the department's
inception in 1969, MB&B investigators have occupied offices
and labs in Kline, Sterling, and Gibbs, as well as in the Sterling
Hall of Medicine. There are also MB&B researchers at the Boyer
Center for Molecular Medicine and at Yale–New Haven Hospital.
While the department
learned to live with its Balkanized geography, the day-to-day impact
of the separation was "a real nuisance," says MB&B's
Frederic M. Richards, Sterling Professor Emeritus. "It
was difficult to communicate," adds Dieter Soll, who studies
plant genetics and at one time directed research groups on two different
floors of Kline.
According to Thomas
Steitz, who headed the department's building committee and whose
investigations of protein structure have direct applications in
the hunt for anti-AIDS drugs, "There's this public image that
scientists are recluses who go off and do things by themselves,
but this couldn't be further from the truth. Scientists interact
constantly, collaborating and bouncing ideas back and forth. Science
is extremely social-indeed, the productivity of many programs is
directly proportional to the extent to which there can be good contact
between and among laboratories."
The new building will
bring roughly two-thirds of the department's 40-plus researchers
together in one place (the remaining one-third of the MB&B faculty
will remain on the Medical School campus). More important than the
centralization is the fact that in this building interaction is
supposed to happen by design. That, say scientists, is bound to
help in their research.
Not that
the department, even in its scattered state, could be accused of
lollygagging. Last
year, MB&B scientists generated 235 papers and attracted more
than $9 million in support from such federal agencies as the National
Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, as well
as private foundations, most notably the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
(HHMI).
Even so, ever since
the department was cobbled together by linking like-minded faculty
members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Medical School,
investigators have talked about doing something to remedy the split
imposed by geography and necessity. "We came up with lots of
'wouldn't it be nice?' proposals, none of which we ever put forward
in a serious way," says Steitz.
In 1985, however, HHMI,
with which Yale already had an affiliation, decided to start a nationwide
program in structural biology. From Hughes's 17 member-institutions,
six would receive significant funding for faculty, equipment, and
a small building. As it happened, MB&B researchers were already
prominent players in the hunt for discovering the chemical structures
of proteins, enzymes, nucleic acids, and many of life's other important
molecules. The so-called WERMS group (the acronym comes from the
first letters of the last names of the investigators: Harold Wyckoff,
Engelman, Richards, Peter Moore, and Steitz) had worked in this
area since before 1975 when the NIH provided a major grant, which
has been renewed every five years.
HHMI was impressed and
awarded Yale $4.2 million. But while it was relatively easy to hire
more faculty members and to upgrade equipment, coming up with a
new headquarters for what's known as the "core laboratory"
and its staff was another story.
Initially,
the scientists suggested building a bridge between Kline and Gibbs.
This idea, however appropriate as metaphor, was tabled when President
Schmidt had Michael McKinnell undertake a comprehensive study of
the building needs of Science Hill. As a result of the year-long
review, which was completed in January 1988, Schmidt was presented
with more than a dozen options. In the end, he decided that the
best plan was to overhaul Gibbs, which will now house the core facility
and a variety of mb&b offices and labs, and link it to Sterling
with a headquarters for the department.
To avoid conflict-of-interest
problems, architects who serve as master planners are usually not
awarded building commissions for projects on which they advise.
But Schmidt broke with convention to give McKinnell's firm-Kallman,
McKinnell and Wood-the job, and overrode the concerns of some about
the firm's lack of experience in designing scientific facilities.
As McKinnell sees it: "There's a lot of mumbo jumbo surrounding
what are referred to as specialized building types, but architecture
is not fundamentally about places, it's principally about people
doing things, and people don't change that much. They have the same
basic requirements, even if they're doing different things in different
buildings. I'm very skeptical about architects who claim that they
know more about the way a building should operate than the people
who will actually work there. One has to listen."
McKinnell and his staff
did plenty of listening. "We trained them a lot," quips
Steitz, acknowledging that the project involved a genuine collaboration
between the scientists and the architects. "We've enjoyed working
with Michael and his associates. They're very creative, their taste
is exquisite, and the building is gorgeous."
Perhaps
too gorgeous. There
are grumblings that the Bass Center—with its elegant copper roof,
brick facade, terrazzo floors, and dramatic marble-trimmed staircase
—might be an example of form triumphing over function. Steitz
rejects the charge. "If you have a building that looks like
Gibbs, which is the height of no architecture, there's a level at
which it's not pleasant to be there," he notes.
Even the so-called extravagances,
like the stairway and the floor, are more functional than they would
at first glance appear to be. "The whole point of this building
is to facilitate people interacting with each other, so one idea
was to create a staircase that was attractive and pleasant to use,
and where if you ran into someone, you would want to stop and talk,"
says Steitz.
As for gracing some
of the floors with terrazzo instead of vinyl tile, Steitz again
invokes function.
"We
know that Yale has not maintained its buildings in the past,
so another goal was to use materials that would last, even if they
cost more initially," he explains. "The terrazzo cost
an extra $40,000, but it will last practically in perpetuity. We
see this as an extremely good investment."
McKinnell, naturally,
concurs. "It's very easy, when the need arises, to build cheaply,
but it's a very ill-advised course, even with the horrendous budgetary
crises that universities are facing," he says. Universities,
the architect notes, have "futures measured in centuries."
Accordingly, McKinnell
decided to build for the ages, but while the Bass Center is, like
Kline, clearly a modern structure, it also makes references to Sterling's
Gothic architecture in a way that says that the building is part
of Yale's traditional architectural fabric. "We're fascinated
by the issue of knitting together the old with the new," McKinnell
says.
In so doing, the architects
have paid close attention to the needs of the end users. "The
key word is space and flexibility," says Mark Biggin, an MB&B
assistant professor. "We designed the labs to be able to expand
and contract as people's research needs change."
The Bass Center is also
designed to accommodate the department's teaching needs, which were
poorly served in the past. "We had to go around hat-in-hand
to various departments to get teaching space for both undergraduate
and graduate courses, and this caused a certain amount of agony
in our department," notes Steitz, taking in the new building's
auditorium with a sweep of his arm. "This is pretty classy."
Whether
it is big enough remains to be seen.
The lecture hall can hold 96 students, but MB&B's largest lecture
course routinely attracts more than that. The department, with its
85-plus majors (up from around 60 several years ago, and gaining
on the roughly 120 students now majoring in biology), is growing
quickly, but budgetary constraints required some compromises. Steitz
and his collaborators made cuts, and the committee squeezed the
existing space to make it more efficient, putting, for example,
cabinets for equipment in corners that had been boxed off to hide
pipes.
But though the department
was forced to live with an auditorium that may prove too small,
Steitz drew the line at one cost-cutting move. "We've never
had any department public space," he explains, noting that
MB&B faculty meetings and other gatherings were held in a less-than-inspiring
room in Gibbs. From his perspective, the jewel of the Bass Center
is the third-floor meeting area, which, with its window framing
East Rock, has one of the best views on campus. "At one stage,"
says Steitz, "this room disappeared from the drawings and wound
up as someplace filled with air handling equipment. I said, 'You
can't do this-this is the heart of the building.' The public spaces,
the places where people interact and have both structured and informal
contact, these are critical." The meeting room stayed. "I
can't think of any aspect of the project that isn't better-and mostly,
much better-than what we had," concludes Steitz. "This
is going to be great."  |
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