Sainsbury Wellcome Centre

Designed by architects Ian Ritchie, The Sainsburys Wellcome Centre represents a turning point in architectural collaboration as it merges the worlds of neuroscience and design. Situated on a tight inner site in Fitzrovia, the building has been organised in accordance with neuroscientific research indicating a cerebral advantage to people working in spaces designed with high connectivity, multiple vantage points, and an attention to spatial and colour perception.
To be released alongside ‘Neural Architecture’, a publication detailing this groundbreaking new process, Squint/Opera were asked to produce an informative and involving film that would foreground the intense collaboration between scientists and designers. Using a narrative structure made up of interviews with key personnel including Nobel Prize Winner John O’ Keefe, the film documents both the aesthetics of the building as well as the story of its inception, on both sides a multi-scale approach which reflects the ‘scale-free network’ of the brain.