Richards Medical Research Laboratories - Architecture

Architecture

In the Richards building, laboratories are housed in three towers attached in pinwheel formation to a central fourth tower that houses mechanical systems, research animals, stairs and elevators. Each laboratory tower has eight floors, each of which is a 45 foot (13.5 m) square that is entirely free of stairs, elevators and internal support columns. Each tower is supported by eight external columns that are attached to the four edges of each floor at "third-point" locations, the two points on each side that divide it into three equal parts. That placement resulted in four column-free cantilevered corners on each floor, which Kahn filled with windows. The support structure of these towers consists of pre-stressed concrete elements that were fabricated off-site and assembled on-site with a crane.

Attached to the sides of the laboratory towers are large vertical shafts, some of which hold exhaust ducts and some of which hold stairwells. These shafts, the most striking aspect of the building's exterior, are made from cast-in-place concrete and clad with brick.

In contrast to the three laboratory towers, which have prominent windows and intricate structures that were assembled from prefabricated elements, the central tower of the Richards building, the one devoted to service functions, has few windows and a structure that is a single unit of cast-in-place concrete. Attached to its wall farthest from the three laboratory towers are four large air intake shafts, each bringing air to one of four conditioning units on the tower's roof from a "nostril" near the ground, far away from the emissions at the tops of the exhaust shafts. Three of those conditioning units provide fresh air for the three laboratory towers and the fourth serves the central service tower itself.

The Goddard building has the same basic design as Richards. Its two laboratory towers and service tower (for stairs, elevators, etc.) are connected in a straight line to the westernmost tower of the Richards building. A research library is located in Goddard's upper floors with reading carrels that cantilever from the building's face.

Emily Cooperman, a specialist in historic preservation on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, authored the document that nominated the Richards and Goddard buildings together as a National Historic Landmark. In it she says that "observers immediately understood them to be a profound statement of American architectural style that provided a potent design alternative to International Modernism, chiefly as it was embodied in the work of Mies van der Rohe (and in particular as it was epitomized by his Seagram Building)". This design alternative was provided, she notes, through their clear expression of served and servant spaces, their evocation of the architecture of the past, and their structure of reinforced concrete that is clearly visible and openly depicted as bearing weight, approaches that "countered the philosophy of International Modernism of undifferentiated, universal space and volume and of the minimization of the appearance of weight and load through such constructional devices as the glass curtain wall and the predominance of structural steel."

According to Thomas Leslie, author of Louis I. Kahn: Building Art, Building Science, "he debates that it inspired and the legions of designers who sought to learn from its example made Richards—for all its well-documented flaws—among the most influential of Kahn's works."