How HOK achieved design consensus for London's Francis Crick Institute

HOK worked on the Francis Crick Institute for more than seven years. The firm was as much a mediator as it was the project’s architect and designer.

The 980,000-sf, $931 million facility is the result of a unique financing mechanism that brought together three of the U.K.’s heaviest funders of biomedical research—the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, and the Wellcome Trust—and three leading universities—University College London, Imperial College London, and King’s College London.