GENETIC ENGINEERING.

Education and research are two of the key themes of the Millennium effort. The International Centre for Life will serve science and inject new spirit into Newcastle.

The International Centre for Life, designed by Terry Farrell & Partners, stands on a prominent 10 acre site next to Newcastle's central station. Its important purpose is partly educational and partly to provide facilities for scientific research and development, in particular into genetics and DNA (Francis Crick and James Watson, who discovered DNA in 1953 are the patrons of the centre.)

The main elements of the Centre are: a Genetics Institute, a Bioscience Centre for biotechnology business, a Bioethics Forum for examining the implications of rapid advances in genetics, a fully equipped 'Superlab' for local schoolchildren, the Helix Gallery -- a kind of indoor DNA theme park with a motion simulator, brain show, theatre and interactive exhibits, and a Global Garden.

The scheme, curving north-south around the easterly edge of the site, is characterized by separation of parts and articulated links. Visually, buildings are given distinguishing colours taken from DNA codings: green (Global Garden roof), yellow (Bioscience and Genetics), blue (Genetics) and red (internal wall, Global Garden).

Appropriately, the centre curves embryonically around a central square, its north-south spine traced by a public footpath through the site. Another historic route, the path of an old road, is picked out by paving and runs diagonally through the square from a ceremonial gateway between Bioscience and Genetics. An old market keeper's house in the square, like a navel in the body, has been restored and is an umbilical cord with the past.

The business-like Genetics Institute is oriented towards the street rather than the square, and linked to the lower Helix Gallery by a 'ski slope'. It sets in motion a spiral that cascades down to the gallery's lowest curve, and at this point, the geometry refers back to the domestic scale of the market keeper's house. Aesthetically, the exterior of the gallery, which is a black box contained by a skin of profiled metal, relates to the industrial aesthetic of railyards.

On the south-west, the Global Garden provides entrance to the gallery. Sheltered by an undulating copper canopy on a wooden skeleton, the garden's form and content celebrates life's diversity. The organic nature of the building was inspired by the structure and complex geometries of a leaf. Achieved by advanced computer techniques, it is pure sculpture.