The building, designed by Jestico + Whiles, provides 7,600 square metres of research space.  This includes two clean rooms, one of which occupies the entire lower ground floor (in order to minimise vibrations), and a 1,500 square metres research lab including laser, optical, metrology and chemical laboratories, along with offices, a seminar room and accommodation.  The top floor also includes a roof terrace.  The outside of the building consists of a composite cladding, with an external stainless steel 'veil'.

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".

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