IARC headquarters

The International Agency for Research on Cancer is a specialist agency of the World Health Organization, established to promote international collaboration on cancer prevention. In 2022, it will move to an ultra-modern building in the Biodistrict in Lyon-Gerland, a growing destination for life sciences research in the French city.  

WSP has been supporting the design and construction of this world-leading facility, providing a range of structural and technical engineering services. The building will be home to 300 researchers and contain laboratories, offices, and a library, as well as meeting spaces, an auditorium and a restaurant with a garden terrace. “The project is about creating a unique building dedicated to global cancer research,” says Didier Moulart, business development manager at WSP. 

To ensure that those serendipitous meetings are as pleasant as possible, the new IARC headquarters is designed in accordance with the WELL certification for wellbeing, with materials chosen to minimize indoor pollution. The architecture is inspired by the principles of biomimicry, with a double glass skin facade with thermochromic blades that changes in response to external conditions, becoming more opaque to protect the building from extremes of heat and light. The laboratory treatment systems will allow 75-80% of the energy used to be recovered, and the WSP team also proposed an innovative flywheel energy storage device to further reduce the building’s energy demand. 

Flexibility was an important part of the brief, so the laboratories are standardized with moveable partition walls. The MEP systems are sized for future adaptability, as is the structure, with the potential to add an extra floor. In the basement, the IARC BioBank is one of the largest, most varied collections of samples in the world. To preserve the precious contents and ensure its continuous operation, the power systems were designed with high levels of security and redundancy, and the WSP team simulated the airflow using computational fluid dynamics to demonstrate that during both normal and emergency modes, the right conditions would prevail throughout the space.