News

Creating a new physics facility on a site where scientific history was made.

The University of Cambridge’s world-renowned Cavendish Labs are the facility where atoms were first split, sub-atomic particles discovered and DNA unravelled. This year, the site has reopened as The Ray Dolby Centre, a state-of-the-art physics facility that has been designed to help the University continue to lead on the world stage of science and research.

Building the Ray Dolby Centre was a technically complex, large-scale project with conflicting requirements between adjacent individual labs. This necessitated collaboration between the design and client teams and testing of these opposing constraints thoroughly.

We utilised our skills in creating virtual environments to articulate our design ideas to the users and made sure to bring together the whole design team to understand better the pressures and concerns of other teams.

The build wasn’t without its challenges: from materials supply to the COVID19 pandemic, this project took over a decade to complete. Additionally, many of the experiments that will be conducted in the labs will be so sensitive, that nearby speed bumps in the road had to be removed and bus routes diverted. The layout of the building on the site was carefully considered such that the most sensitive labs were kept well away from roads and other sources of vibration. One of the more interesting constraints involved orientating the building in alignment with the earth’s electromagnetic field so that any associated interference could be minimised.

Part of the original design brief from the university in 2015 was to avoid generating space heating and hot water from fossil fuel sources. Therefore, the whole building is heated and cooled via a massive ground source heat pump array using 150m deep boreholes below the building. Not only will this reduce operational energy for the life of the building, it’s also a robust and resilient solution for the required 24/7 operation of the physics department.

This has been a great achievement for a scheme of this scale and importance for the global scientific community and we are immensely proud of the project team who worked closely with the architects, Jestico + Whiles as well as the client team at the University of Cambridge that delivered it. We can scarcely imagine what discoveries and innovations will emerge from this facility – all of which will have been partly enabled by Hoare Lea.

For more information, please contact James Mackenzie-Burrows, Matt Chambers or Alex Root.