The Perth Children’s Hospital has celebrated the opening of the brand-new Telethon Kids Institute, on Friday, August 31.
Designed by global architectural and consulting practice, Woods Bagot, the building’s overarching concept is based on different bodily functions which are alluded to throughout the building in both literal and abstract forms. The 10,000-square-metre project spans several floors and is comprised of 7,000 square metres of workplace interiors, 2,000 square metres of wet labs, and 1,000 square metres of biomedical working areas which are linked together by a modern entryway and sleek dining rooms.
The Telethon Kid’s Institute is one of the largest and most successful medical research institutes in Australia, comprising of a dedicated and diverse team of over 700 staff and students. Each year the Perth Telethon Weekend encourages donations to fund research for the Institute and to help children in need. The Perth Telethon Weekend currently holds the title of highest fundraising Telethon (per capita) in the world.
“Specifically tailored for the activities and interactions of our people, our new workspaces give us the greatest opportunity to do the very best research,” said the Telethon Kids Institute’s director, Jonathan Carapetis, PhD.
Moving the Telethon Kids Institute from its former location on Roberts Road, Subiaco was a large-scale operation and involved:
- Relocating about 60 truckloads of office, lab, cryogenics, bioresources and IT equipment.
- Using close to 2500 crates to move smaller items from the offices, labs and IT.
- Requiring a special cryogenics shipper (the first one of its kind in Australia) to move fragile equipment.
- Safely moving hundreds of thousands of samples and cell lines, amongst a list of other challenging tasks.
The interiors of the new workspace have been designed to provide employees with diverse settings for learning, collaborating, and socialising. Working areas can be expanded or compressed to enable collaboration in a group setting as well as focused work, mimicking the cellular activity of division and growth. Quiet zones with acoustically sensitive features have also been installed on each floor.
Additionally, the brand-new laboratories for the Institute have been created and designed to the highest standard, including a large open plan layout, several microscopy rooms, freezer farms, and specialty suites to conduct experiments. Other new interiors throughout the building include additional laboratories, four trial suites, and a cryogenics facility.
Woods Bagot Senior Associate, Suresh Dhillon, led the design of the new laboratory and research areas.
“The laboratories have been designed to provide an inspiring workplace for researchers with light, open and flexible spaces that are visually connected to the surroundings,” she said, “the level of flexibility that has been built into the modular design enables the research spaces to be easily adapted to meet the Institute’s future needs.”
More information on the Telethon Kids Institute can be found here.