The McGill Life Sciences Building_Francesco Bellini and Cancer Pavillions is being developed to act as a hub between the Faculty of Medicine's McIntyre Building and the Science Faculty's Stewart Building. The goal is house elements of both faculties within the Bellini building as a nexus to enhance interaction between disciplines and engender synergy.
The site, situated on the upper slopes of Mount Royal, presents many topographical, historical and urban design challenges. The primary address on Pine Avenue drops steeply 20 meters to a mid-block thoroughfare, which is the secondary access point to the Bellini building. To the west and south of the site, the 1960's McIntyre and Stewart buildings dominate the 19th century mansions and outbuildings to the east. These are set in a landscape designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead and are a historically significant ensemble. Further complications include an underground parking garage, which lies below the majority of the site, and a height restriction, which follows the topography in order to preserve views from the mountaintop.
Clearly this amazing sites' constraints and opportunities present a challenge to achieve constructability, ease of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, the appropriate juxtaposition of program components, good natural light into, and good vistas from, the building.
Internally the building is organized into three distinct components. The first consists of wet and dry bench laboratories and local support spaces such as staff offices, group rooms and equipment rooms, which are generic in nature but designed to allow a degree of customization based on a PI's needs.
Secondly there are a series of stacked core equipment spaces, which are extremely flexible in their internal division and with higher structural loading capacity. These areas will be serviced electrically and mechanically to allow rapid reconfiguration, with minimum disruption to other activities, as emerging technologies are implemented and introduced into ongoing research.
The last building area is an animal resource centre housing mice, including transgenics, in 22,000 cages. This facility is intended to be a SPF barrier facility and will occupy the two lowest levels of the building with direct, discrete access to loading dock area. The facility's infrastructure is being designed to allow the addition in the future of housing for 11,000 cages with minimal impact on the existing mouse population.
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