Aquaria Research Laboratory

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Balmoral Water Reservoir House

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Aquaria Research Laboratory

Firm

Conrad Gargett Riddel

Type

Educational › University
Industrial › Research Facility

YEAR

2012

SIZE

10,000 sqft - 25,000 sqft

Aquaria is a new three story research laboratory built
within the confines of the courtyard of an existing heritage listed building, the overall height matching the window sills of
the existing adjoining building. The
highly serviced Aquaria building provides the university with six aquatic
research bays, facilitating state of the art salt & fresh water based
research.
The brief was to provide a robust and versatile space
which could be added to and fitted out in any configuration as experiments are
developed in the future. A modular system of materials was developed during the
design process to enable the construction of the structure. All services have
been exposed and reticulated along the northern wall between the building and
the access stair, allowing for future experiments to use the cable trays to
reticulate further services.
A free
standing external lift provides vertical transportation of people, animals and
research equipment across Aquaria‘s levels and to a new rooftop new animal holding
facility.
The structure has been designed so that the single skin
cladding system can be utilized as the final finish both externally and
internally. The folded copper screen is natural copper with a perforated folded
pattern reminiscent of a polymerase
chain reaction DNA strand, a form of research proposed for
the laboratory.