By Guest Blogger - Pharma Giles
Phoni’s newest and most glamorous facilities do not come cheaply. Indeed, only a company with billion dollar profits could possibly afford the scale and sophistication of the structures that adorn (or perhaps, more accurately, disfigure) its R & D sites world-wide these days.
Visitors are always amazed at the space and light within these new buildings, so reminiscent of that seen and felt in large European cathedrals.
No expense has been spared to give the impression that no expense has been spared. It is difficult to describe how large these buildings are to anyone who hasn’t seen them, or indeed, to even understand why they should be so large, given their relatively mundane functions.
One could understand a functional need for such vast corridors and indoor spaces if you are making, say, airships, but the output of offices or pharmaceutical research laboratories can hardly warrant such grandeur of construction in relation to their output.
The only possible explanation of the size of these facilities is that they are meant to serve as a monument to the arrogance and egotism of the CEOs and the company directors who authorised their construction. They have certainly succeeded in that. Or perhaps they are saying to their customers, “Hey, here’s what your drug dollars get spent on! Up yours, sucker!”
I was always faintly embarrassed when I received non-Pharma visitors to these buildings; you knew that they were always going to look around and then say something like “no wonder the price of medicines is so high.”
And how could you argue otherwise?
Each new building, as it was constructed in turn, has used different and “exciting” exterior claddings. Some have black and white metal panels. Some have black glass walls, some green. It’s a horrible mix of styles and colours that’s not even worthy of a shopping mall, let alone a research complex. You’d think half a billon dollars would buy you a bit of panache rather than a Tesco’s or Wal-Mart.
The largest and most swaggering of all of these new structures at Phoni is finished in what appears to be wet concrete panels that have the appearance of never having set properly.
We thought that this was deliberate, but in the first high winds they were exposed to, some of these trendy concrete panels blew off the walls and crashed to the ground, narrowly missing a couple of passers-by beneath, suggesting that perhaps the mix was wrong after all.
The scaffolding that was subsequently put up to investigate the problem was there so long, it was painted white to make it less obtrusive.
Red and white stripy tape was used to herd pedestrians away from within striking distance of the walls.
The building in question cost $250 million. It massively overshot its budget by $30m and so to economise, the landscaped gardens that were supposed to surround it on completion were substituted with shingle, making the place look even more like the beached whale that it is. Its initial malfunctions, leaks and structural defects were typical of most of the new architecture on site.
With respect to the buildings alone, all of these huge and luxurious spaces have to cleaned and maintained, and the air within them filtered, temperature controlled and humidity adjusted. That cannot be cheap and certainly doesn’t seem particularly “green”. Even cleaning the windows is a major logistical exercise, especially inside these buildings, giving the architectural penchant for four-storey reception areas with tinted glass and steel walls.
In the light of the impending economies Phoni will have to make, will anyone consider mothballing these expensive-to-run behemoths and moving back to the currently derelict and less prestigious but surely cheaper to run older facilities?
I doubt it somehow. No-one admits to $250m dollar mistakes.
(The views expressed here, do not necessarily represent the views of Thinking Pharma or the Thoughtware Group)
(Tomorrow's Post: Pharma’s Babies and Monsters)
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