Graduate Thesis Project
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There is an emergent movement in the contemporary world of science and technology toward a new model of research, merging the monetary resources of corporations with the intellectual resources of academic institutions. Stanford has created such an alliance with Exxon Mobile worth $100 million, and similarly Intel has partnered with the Berkley, the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Cambridge in England. Such alliances bring benefits to both institutions.
At the moment, these corporate-academic relationships remain purely intellectual and monetary, leaving each to remain physically disconnected. However, what if a marriage between the two institutions could inform an architectural design? Fusing the two entities could foster a symbiotic relationship between the corporate and academic think tanks. What could each offer to the other’s benefit? What unique characteristics inherent to each program could be strengthened or compromised by the their co-habitation and how could architecture guide and foster positive benefits? An academic researcher’s freedom to explore within experimentation can often be in conflict with a corporation’s drive to generate profit efficiently.
How can an architecture allow these programs to infect each other and provoke positive insight into each institution’s own reasoning for their research.
This project investigates the co-habitation of two contrastingly motivated biotechnology institutions within a single architecture in hope of generating an environment that is mutually beneficial within which both the corporation and university can thrive. Science and technology is progressing at such an intensely rapid pace that university researchers will be able to help corporations maintain a work force to pursue new avenues they had not foreseen in their future and deliver the resultant innovations faster and more efficiently. 
The corporate tenant could potentially provide all the research funding for the academic research. This type of partnering begins to distort the line that divides the open research of academia from applied research of corporations and in turn affects the terms of intellectual property, copyrights, and profitability, as well as what is public and private space within the architecture. Cross-institutional relationships between researchers can be cultivated through the intertwining of programs and circulation paths that create a cross-pollination effect. The intermingling of programs and personnel in corridors, social spaces, by virtue of sight, and within specific collaboration areas will produce benefits for both parties. Communication as well as intellectual exchanges will thus become nurtured by the architecture itself. In a way, this project will find the common and exceptional genes between programs and manipulate them with the goal of creating a cooperative architectural organism.
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