The Maxwell Centre, University of Cambridge
- Location
- Cambridge, UK
- Client
- University of Cambridge
- Expertise
- Architecture
- Acoustics
- Interior Design
- Landscape Architecture
- Completion
- 2016
- Size
- 5,000 m²
- Cost
- £26m
The Maxwell Centre aims to expand the University of Cambridge’s world class Cavendish Laboratory and advance the scale of industrial engagement for the benefit of the British economy and society.
The centrepiece building for exploratory ‘blue skies’ research and industrial partnership in the physical sciences on the West Cambridge Campus utilises an innovative layered laboratory design, ensuring services to individual laboratories can be changed without affecting the others.
The lab zone extends the concept of the ‘Lab-Hotel’ we developed for the adjacent Physics of Medicine building. The target is to double the scale of industrial involvement through a combination of activities in the new building, in the collaborating departments and commercial space. Scientists will occupy laboratory and desk space alongside the Cambridge research groups to promote a two-way flow of ideas and expose the best early career researchers to scientific problem-solving that relates directly to industrial need.
The building is named after physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who was the first Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge in 1871 and who discovered electromagnetism and founded statistical mechanics.
