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Work begins on revolutionary ‘soap bubble’ building at Newcastle Science Central

Using similar technology to that developed by the Newcastle University team for the 2012 Olympic Stadium, work has begun on a ‘soap bubble’ building that will house the first research labs at Newcastle Science Central.

Science Central, Newcastle’s £200m flagship project bringing together academia, the public sector, communities, business and industry, will welcome the lightweight fabric structure known as The Key as a major milestone in creating a global centre for urban innovation in the heart of the city.

Being designed by experts at Newcastle University in conjunction with Arup and -space Architects, this will be the University’s first building on the city’s new urban innovation hub.

Aligned with the overall vision for the site to become an exemplar of sustainability, the fabric and timber structure has been designed to have minimum impact on the environment.

Providing a unique venue for research – where not just the inside of the building but the structure itself is used for teaching and learning – it will also be used to showcase the Science Central vision to business and industry leaders, policy-makers and local communities.

Peter Gosling, Professor of Computational and Structural Mechanics at Newcastle University and leading the project, said: “Given a set of fixed points, a soap film will spread naturally between them to offer the smallest achievable surface area.

“It follows similar principles to the giant bubbles children make where they pull the soap to create these huge cylindrical shapes. But more than that, the shape is also incredibly strong, so the resulting design is not only extremely efficient in terms minimising the materials it uses but also very resilient.

“What is really unique about The Key is that it will be the first time a fabric structure has been used as a working space and this presents a number of technical challenges for us around heating, lighting and insulation. So the structure itself will be as important as the research that is going on inside it.”

Andrew Grounsell, Associate Director at Space Architecture, added: “This has been a collaborative project from the outset, seeing us work closely with both Newcastle University and the Arup-led design team to understand and deliver to their project needs and requirements.

“By its very nature The Key is an incredibly innovative and unique project that will itself be a research tool to examine tensile fabric performance and demountability for relocation to another site.

“The end result will be a fantastic spectacle, creating an iconic facility that can be relocated to another site in years to come.”

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