Institute of pharmacology and structural biology, Toulouse

The institute stretches out ‘like a line at ground level’ across a site of rolling fields.

Working with the gradients of the site, our design proposes the industrial rigour of a large floorplate – a shared area of laboratories fed by a technical gallery – and a community of private, individual research offices that are moored to a central 150m long axis, like a series of small houses, that have views over the surrounding protected landscape and its ancient trees. The whole is dominated by an administrative ‘control tower’ and by the library.