What decisions did architects make when designing spaces for the new interdisciplinary sciences of materials and nanotechnology? A recently-published paper in the journal Minerva tells that story. Co-authors Hyungsub Choi, a CNS-UCSB affiliate and assistant professor at Seoul National University, and Brit Shields, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, explain the calculus that went into creating two buildings on the UPenn campus: the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter and Krishna P. Singh Center of Nanotechnology. Both of these discipline-defying structures housed seminal research in materials and nanoscience respectively. To read more about the article and the histories of these buildings, visit the UPenn News site (link below).

(Photo © Albert Vecerka/Esto: Krishna P. Sing Center for Nanotechnology )