Eugene Wigner (left) and E.O. Wollan in the Lab's early days. Note the nails in the wallboard.
If early ORNL was going to endure, it needed robust and modern facilities.
In the late 1940s, ORNL (known then as Clinton Laboratories) was making the conversion from its wartime mission to a center for scientific research and isotope production as host of the world’s first continuously operating nuclear reactor.
Concerns about the Lab’s “permanence” populated the vernacular of administrators. The Atomic Energy Commission’s Christmas Eve decision in 1947 to move reactor development to Argonne stung ORNL staff, who considered it a downgrade from a national lab to an isotope production and chemical processing facility and a threat to its continued existence.
There were also highly placed doubters, Robert Oppenheimer among them, that ORNL could thrive in its East Tennessee location.
If ORNL was going to endure, it needed robust and modern facilities. The 1950s heralded a $20 million expansion campaign for the Lab that eventually added nine new buildings, among them a new administrative and research complex with an assigned number — 4500 — that became its name.
Accommodations until then had been admittedly spartan. The X-10 site was noted for its mud and dust, particularly during construction. Offices and labs were hastily built during the war, as can be seen in an early photo of two giants in ORNL history, Ernest Wollan and Eugene Wigner. Wollan is considered a founder of neutron scattering science at ORNL. Wigner was one of the most outstanding minds behind the Manhattan Project and destined to become a Nobel laureate, in 1963.
If you look at the space between Wigner and Wollan in the photo, you’ll see wallboard crudely nailed to the underlying studs — a hallmark of a place thrown together in a hurry. The Graphite Reactor itself was completed in nine months — a rocket pace, by today’s standards. The national historic landmark’s exterior resembles a metal barn more than how a nuclear facility is conceived today.
The hasty construction was brought on by the urgency in racing the Axis powers to a nuclear weapon. Postwar ORNL was intent on presenting itself as a growing institution that intended to be around in the future, i.e., permanent. In early 1950 ORNL’s scientific director, Alvin Weinberg, noted, “It was in 1949 that the Laboratory gave to the Atomic Energy Commission, and to the country, some of the year’s most important nuclear developments, and it was in 1949 that the Laboratory started to house itself permanently.”
Architects drafted up the plans for proper facilities for the research laboratory as the expansion program progressed. ORNL Director Clarence Larson wrote in early 1951, “Implementing the expansion of our total program is the extensive construction activity which has marked the year just completed. Evidence of permanency exists throughout the area.”
The ORNL newspaper, The News, even noted the springing up of several churches in town brought an “air of permanence.”
Architectural drawings for the ORNL expansion show a large spider-shaped facility with long wings, located in a flat area east of the Graphite Reactor and its associated chemistry labs. That concept became the 4500 complex, with Bldg. 4500-North completed in 1952, offering labs, offices and a research library in a rock-solid brick building.
Originally the buildings were essentially inverted, with the wings pointing away from the center. The design was ultimately flipped so that the 4500-North and -South wings point toward each other, creating the “canyon” between the two buildings’ wings. Other buildings in the drawing are placed at an angle to the 4500 complex, similar to how the Bldg. 5505 and 5510 structures are situated now.
An annex on 4500-North’s east side was added in 1961. The newer Wing 5 would contain the Lab Director’s Office, Weinberg Auditorium, more offices and the Health Services clinic. Some early concepts show a taller section on the 4500-North’s west side, which was eventually detached, becoming Bldg. 4501.
Bldg. 4500-South followed in 1961, as well, completing the original concept. An early plan for 4500-South called for only three wings. A fourth was added, making the north and south buildings more or less symmetrical. Bldg. 5500 also appeared around that time as a Van de Graff accelerator lab, moving those operations from Y-12.
The 4500 complex has served as ORNL’s central facility since its occupancy in 1952. Its lab spaces have been replaced with updated facilities, notably the Chemical & Materials Sciences Building across the street, completed in 2011. The modernization campaign in the 2000s means Bldg. 4500-North no longer dominates the landscape.
Still, Bldg. 4500-North, in its seventh decade, continues to be the administrative keystone of the Laboratory. Its brick-and-mortar presence manifests Weinberg and Larson’s vision that the Southeast’s national laboratory, despite the skeptics, was here to stay. – Bill Cabage