Brain cells.

Gert Wingdardh has been working at Astra Hassle for several years, bringing a scattered group of laboratory and research buildings together into a unified complex. Astra Hassle is one of the reasons why Sweden, with a small population, and not many natural resources, still enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. A research centre near Gothenburg, it is a part of the mighty Wallenberg empire that controls a large chunk of the country's economy. (It is a paradox that the strongly social-democratic nations of northern Scandinavia still have very large firms that are descended from the great estates of the eighteenth century which started to introduce industrialisation in the form of iron founding, timber production and so on.) This branch of the Wallenberg outfit is devoted to basic research into biology and pharmacology. Its employees have a very high level of education. Over half have higher degrees, of whom a large number are PhDs.

All these clever people are employed to be creative, and the company has decided that the best way of fostering creation is to make links. Not, of course, in the crassly reductivist Anglo-Saxon fashion of throwing all the staff into the neutralising prairies of open-plan offices, but by developing the combi-office that has emerged in the last couple of decades in the Scandinavian countries, and to some extent in Germany. The combi principle gives people the privacy of their own space: the monastic cell; wider but still highly specialised areas emerge off the individual cells for the small specialised group; opening from this group of spaces is the more public realm of the organisation in general, its internal streets and the gathering places like the restaurant. The principle is that folk should have a wide range of places in which to think and work, that the corporation will get the most out of its employees if they are given a congenial and varied workplace, and that if you are employing a lot of very brainy people, there is a great deal to be gained in encouraging casual social contacts between them, from which quite unexpected and startling ideas may begin to emerge. The most clear examples of the combi-office principle are in the work of Niels Torp (for instance the SAS HQ in Stockholm - AR March 1989) and Ralph Erskine's brilliant Ark in London (AR July 1992) which was proposed to bring civilised work practices to the land of Neanderthal management.

The Astra Hassle parti is not as clear as these because it is a complicated and almost labyrinthine attempt to draw together diverse scattered buildings on a large site into some kind of overall order. I do not wish to imply by this that there is a feeling of severe discipline. Quite the contrary: the separate red brick buildings that were scattered across the site with '60s abandon have now been connected in collegiate fashion with a tissue of aluminium and glass.

There are new laboratories, which in a more specialised magazine would deserve detailed criticism; suffice it to say that they are very flexible, being serviced by large ducts that run straight across the blocks; individual cells generally take up the perimeter of the highly serviced inner areas. But the really exciting and innovative part of the new work is the spine and its southern termination in the service and restaurant wing; a long and elegant route has been made that unites all the parts. It terminates in a crab-claw that with great ingenuity and finesse encompasses a small mound of natural landscape

Because clever and decent people generally want to be as near as possible to nature, the transparency of the perimeter has been maximised. To prevent excessive heat gain, the insolated sides of the complex are protected by elegantly curved perforated metal horizontal sunshades.

The crab-claw shows the strategy at its best, with the light filtered through the layered facade and projected into the interior to make it a kind of internal sun-dial: a relationship of space and light that was quite impossible before the invention of large-scale sheets of glass and industrial manufacture of aluminium. When he was a young lad, Wingardh was a champion of PoMo in Sweden; his position was a rebellion against the grim, bureaucratic paste of '70s Swedish architecture. He has shown triumphantly how to escape from the traps of both mechanical Modernism and posing PoMo.