FYI,

"New Architecture Inspired By Living Cells"
LiveScience.com
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060811/sc_space/newarchitectureinspir
edbylivingcells

: The building, designed to resemble a cell from the outside,
: includes forms inspired by molecular biology on the inside. It
: will be home to the Institute for Nanobiomedical Technology and
: Membrane Biology in Chengdu, China.

: The design comes from a collaboration of individuals from
: different disciplines initiated by Sloan Kulper, a former
: Massachusetts Institute of Technology architectural student who
: once took a biology class.

: The instructor for that class, Shuguang Zhang, associate director
: of the Center for Biomedical Engineering at MIT, frequently
: discussed similarities between architecture and structures in
: biology.

: "Nature has produced abundant magnificent, intricate and fine
: molecular and cellular structures through billions of years of
: molecular selection and evolution," Zhang said.

: It was such discussions that sparked Kulper's interest in the
: shape of the smallest structural unit of living things.

: "When I took Shuguang's course, I was thrilled to learn that
: structural biologists had developed such an amazing language for
: describing new and complex forms," Kulper said. "Also, structural
: biology is basically concerned with the sort of geometries that
: architects and designers often work with, though on a completely
: different scale."

: About a year a later, when Kulper was offered an opportunity to
: serve as a founding advisor of a new biological research facility
: in China, he teamed up with Zhang and another MIT graduate, Audrey
: Roy, currently a software engineer at Sharpcast, Inc. to develop
: the concepts for a building with a biology theme.

: The pioneering design for the cell-shaped building was inspired
: by "elegantly folded protein structures and their simple and
: beautiful structural motifs," According to Zhang.

: The three worked with a group of Chinese architects to develop
: sketches and models while simultaneously studying cellular
: structures that had formal similarities to the spaces being
: designed, Kulper said. "We worked with images of proteins,
: membranes and organelles alongside photos and textbook images of
: glazing systems and cantilevers."

: The $12 million, six-story-tall building will sport bay windows
: all around the surface of the building similar to proteins in a
: cell membrane, which stick out of the surface like little
: potatoes.

: The institute will also have a crystal-shaped lecture hall with a
: crystal diffraction pattern on the ceiling. Biologists crystallize
: proteins and pass X-rays through them to observe the scattering
: patterns in order to study the shape of a protein.

: "The building is very interesting. I have always wondered what it
: would be like working within the cell," Institute Professor
: Phillip Sharp said after viewing the renderings of the building.

Mark Reiff