William Gates Building, Cambridge Explained

William Gates Building
Cost:	£20 million
Address:	15 JJ Thomson Avenue
Awards:	Bronze Green Impact Award
Status:	completed
Completion Date:	2001
Owner:	University of Cambridge
Top Floor:	2
Location:	Cambridge, England
Coordinates:	52.2109°N 0.092°W

The William Gates Building, or WGB, is a square building that houses the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, on the University's West Cambridge site in JJ Thomson Avenue south of the Madingley Road in Cambridge, England.^{[1] [2] [3]} Construction on the building began in 1999 and was completed in 2001 at a cost of £20 million. Opened by Maurice Wilkes, it was named after William H. Gates Sr., the father of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.^[4] The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided 50% of the money for the building's construction.

Building features

The building has the following features:

• The glass wall in the "fishbowl," a communal seating area in the building, is decorated with a paper-tape representation of the original EDSAC "Initial Orders" (boot program) written by David Wheeler and of a program written by Maurice Wilkes in 1949 to compute squares^[5]
• The building's main thoroughfare, called "The Street", has tiles that match the binary, UTF-8 representation of 'Computer Laboratory — AD 2001 — ☺'
• The fishbowl contains the original door to the Mathematical laboratory^[6]

Energy efficiency

The William Gates Building aims to be energy-efficient.^[7] Its energy-saving measures include:^[8]

• Aggressive sleep scheduling of desktop computers.
• Use of a chilled-beam convection-based cooling system, with Oventrop valves, to cool rooms in the summer, and warm the floor above in the winter.
• Turning off lights in corridors, and the street, using motion sensors.

See also

• Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, USA
• Gates Computer Science Building, Stanford, USA

Notes and References

1. https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/william-gates-building The William Gates Building
2. William Gates Building, University of Cambridge, Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), UK.
3. Web site: William Gates Building, Architect, Photos, Address, Date, Architecture, Images. e-architect.
4. Web site: Cambridge Computing: The First 75 Years. 138.
5. Web site: EDSAC Initial Orders and Squares Program . Richards . Martin . 2005-09-15 . 2019-06-20 .
6. News: . In pictures: How Cambridge Computer Lab changed the world . BBC News . 2013-04-24 . 2019-06-20 .
7. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/local/wgb/ecobuilding.html Energy efficiency
8. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/local/wgb/ecobuilding.html Energy efficiency