Nottingham Buildings

The Discovery Building

Bio-City, Pennyfoot Street / Lower Parliament Street.
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Standing on the corner of Pennyfoot Street and Lower Parliament Street, this is another building in the expanding Nottingham Bio-City group that aims to make the city a prominent centre for bio-science and bio-chemistry research. Sygnature, the UK's largest independent contract research organisation that provides services to the pharmaceutical industry and who have been operating in the other Bio-City building for several years have already taken up three floors (30,000 sq. ft.) of the 50,000 sq. ft. building.

The building was designed by the local firm of CPMG Architects who have offices in Warser Gate, and construction was undertaken by Willmott Dixon who have their head office in Letchworth. Nottingham City Council contributed £24M towards the overall £30M cost, with the remaining £6M coming from the Local Growth Fund.

Whilst I understand that the building has many very interesting and innovative features inside (Not seen by me), the external design, save for one thing,  is basically a very uninteresting grey rectangular box.  That one thing lifts it from the ordinary and makes it a totally unique design. It is the 'curtain' that appears to be made up of plastic discs suspended in several layers from steel cables and metal tubes that wraps around the entire frontage. This artwork known as 'The Corona' was designed by West Bridgford artist Wolfgang Buttress and acts as a solar screen.  It is also somehow  illuminated using live activity from the surface of the sun and from pictures I have seen, it looks spectacular at night.

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