Box of delight

Appearing on London’s King’s Cross horizon like an upturned beetle, with its row of metal chimneys protruding like little pairs of legs from the fattened silver belly of its roof, the Francis Crick Institute cuts a strange silhouette. As its dichroic-coated glass fins shimmer with rainbow iridescence in the late summer sun, it could be one of the specimens under the electron microscope buried in the bowels of this new £700m biomedical research facility.