William Gates Building, Cambridge

For other uses, see William Gates Building.

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.

William Gates Building
General information
Status	Completed
Location	Cambridge, England
Address	15 JJ Thomson Avenue
Coordinates	52.210925°N 0.092022°E / 52.210925; 0.092022 (William Gates Building, Cambridge)
Completed	2001
Cost	£20 million
Owner	University of Cambridge
Height
Top floor	2
Awards and prizes	Bronze Green Impact Award

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 — ☺'^{[citation needed]}
• 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