DNA’s Double Helix Informs The Design Of This Biotech Center

DNA’s double helix has been emblematic of the sciences ever since Francis Crick and James Watson published their 1953 paper revealing its twisted-ladder structure. It’s also part of the day-to-day business of Illumina, a San Diego biotechnology company that makes gene-sequencing tools. That’s why ZGF Architects, an industry leader in healthcare and research facilities, for such clients as Kaiser Permanente and Google, contributing to the firm’s rank of 21 among the Interior Design top 100 Giants for 2025, turned to that shape as a motif for Illumina’s new executive briefing center. With sustainability another ZGF pillar, the 30,000-square-foot, public-facing space, functioning as a catalyst for forging customer relationships with researchers and clinicians, offering event, group and private work, and breakout areas, is also an adaptative reuse project, built in a four-story storage facility already existing on the campus.

Connecting the center’s three-story atrium is a grand staircase rendered in Di-Noc–finished steel, its form inspired by the double helix. “The substructure was particularly complicated,” ZGF partner James Woolum explains. “The first run of stairs is a spiral, while the second is an ellipse, meaning they had to be engineered independently.” The structures were broken down into 25 precision-engineered sections, each made in Portland, Oregon, and shipped to San Diego. “That required precise coordination of dimensions between off-site fabrication and on-site construction,” Woolum continues. He then chose terrazzo for treads and concealed gently glowing LEDs along the inner balustrade.

Additional illumination, in function and name, comes from IllumaLens, Ray King’s 42-foot-high, site-specific installation of more than 5,000 glass pieces that refracts sunlight and changes color throughout the day. “The flow cells inside Illumina’s gene sequencer,” Woolum adds, “have a similar kind of dichroic quality.”