Design of the second tower will undoubtedly be more straightforward than the first, a project that started as a series of puzzle pieces—labs, a vivarium, BSL-3 suites, and teaching space, including classrooms and a 319-seat auditorium—that had to be organized into a coherent whole. The mix of public and secured areas injected additional complexity into the overall effort.

The final product is a 289,000-sf high-rise, with eight levels above ground and two below. Repeating banks of rectangular labs stretch across the building's eastern and western perimeters, while the two ends of house investigator offices that fan out against curved glass walls, a shape echoed in the single-story auditorium that serves as a transitional element breaking down the scale between the street and the massive tower. The center core area contains lab support spaces.

"Because researchers had to compete to be awarded space in the Durham Research Center, the labs had to follow a generic design in order to be adaptable for their ultimate users," says Michael Faber, UNMC's manager, major construction projects, in the Facilities Management & Planning department. "The second tower will mimic the layout of the first. However, we know who will be occupying the second tower, so from that standpoint, there are fewer design challenges."

Building Organization

As a result of the occupant selection process, the DRC pulls together researchers in diverse specialties ranging from cancer and cardiovascular diseases to neurosciences, transplantation biology, genetics, and eye research. The tower represents the first time that UNMC has been able to accommodate these scientists in multi-departmental, multi-disciplinary research groups in a single building.

At the same time, the DRC also houses an array of functions that serve the broader medical center community, from the large microscopes available to scientists working elsewhere on campus to classrooms and a student computer room. Facing the need to segregate the communal areas from the labs, HDR Inc., the Omaha-based architectural and engineering firm, along with Research Facilities Design of San Diego, devised a scheme that employs both horizontal and vertical separations to establish public and private zones of the building.

As a sign of its more public orientation, the auditorium sits at the base of the tower, which also contains the DRC's three classrooms and computer room, all clustered off the main lobby following the arc of the south end of the building. On subsequent floors, administrative offices and conference rooms are located in the same zone, off a designated public court just outside the elevators.

Also on the main floor are four core laboratories, which offer a variety of research functions (such as Flow Cytometry, Confocal Microscopy, Monoclonal and Protein Analysis) available to the scientific community and the general public. A key-card system restricts entry to the core facilities to authorized personnel, just as it protects the security of the lab blocks on the upper levels.

With the exception of the building exhaust system, installed in a penthouse at the top of the building, all other major mechanical systems and equipment occupy the entire second floor. Along with providing a visual marker of the horizontal transition to research-intensive space, the second-story location, unique on the campus, minimizes the need for long duct runs to handle the hefty ventilation requirements of the below-grade vivarium.

"The location provides for a very efficient design and saves overall square footage on the lab floors. Duct sizes and pipe chases are smaller when serving the building in two directions," observes Faber.

Vibration and Ventilation Requirements

To reduce the vibrations generated by equipment in the mechanical system (compressors, pumps, supply and exhaust fans, etc.) that could interfere with sensitive research procedures, the second-floor mechanical space has been designed with an increase in mass and stiffness of the structure.

More extensive vibration protection results from the use of concrete instead of steel as the tower's framing material. According to HDR's Craig Ellis, who served as project manager, building the structure of steel would have required a significant increase in member sizes to reduce vibration.

"Cast-in-place concrete systems are stiffer, have greater mass, better damping characteristics, and are inherently more vibration resistant," Ellis explains. "The roof of the auditorium is steel, and there's some miscellaneous steel throughout the rest of the structure, but primarily, it was built using concrete. For scientific laboratories, concrete is the material of choice."

The labs and vivarium also have heavy-duty ventilation requirements, with 10 and 15 air changes per hour, respectively, of 100 percent outside air. Outside air is conditioned for temperature and humidity at the air handling units before it enters the building HVAC distribution system. For energy conservation, huge energy recovery units capture heat or cooling energy from the exhaust air before it is discharged at roof level. Water-source heat pumps handle excessive internal heat gains from equipment, thus minimizing the amount of outside air for space cooling. The use of insulated glass windows with UV protection also adds to the building's energy efficiency.

UNMC's central utilities plant furnishes the building with steam and chilled water. To regulate temperatures and appropriate pressure relationships throughout the interior, the DRC is tied into a campus-wide building controls system that was developed in-house.

"This is an all-digital system that has been designed to accommodate our specific needs for log histories, alarming, and so on," says Faber. "Our controls division worked hand-in-hand with the mechanical engineers to write the control and operational sequences for this building, and actually worked as a subcontractor to install specific controls components and program requirements."

Modular Labs and Proprietary Casework

To build in the flexibility necessary to accommodate the diversity of research to be conducted by the building's undesignated occupants, UNMC developed a standard 660-sf lab module equipped with fume hood and biological safety cabinet capabilities (although not all modules will take advantage of these connections). Services to each module include two wet benches and two dry benches, lab vacuum, lab air, compressed air, DI water, potable hot and cold water, and natural gas. Medical-grade CO2 is centrally distributed through the building to eliminate the need for cylinder deliveries and traffic through the corridors.

Sixteen-foot-long lab benches run perpendicular to the internal racetrack corridor, which houses support space for common functions and shared equipment like dark rooms, image rooms, tissue culture labs, equipment and instrument rooms, and freezer rooms. Write-up areas for students are tucked under the windows of the labs, which fill the space with natural light.

UNMC also designed its own proprietary structural support system for casework that enables the modules to be reconfigured without interrupting ongoing research activities.

"The generic design gives us the ability to create dedicated labs needed for various scientists, whether for security, biohazard, or other reasons," says Faber. "The casework structure allows the modules to be partitioned very inexpensively, without having to remove items from the shelves or to remove the shelving itself. I can make a 660-sf module into a single, stand-alone lab that is totally environmentally separated from its neighbors."

Deployed for the first time, the patent-pending modular components will serve as the standard lab model in all future medical center construction.

BSL-3 Facility

The Durham Research Center also houses a five-cell BSL-3 suite. Four of the cells are currently active, with the fifth to come on line in the future. Designed for multi-user, multi-agent research, each cell is a self-contained lab. The suite features a "shower-out" design for researchers leaving the facility.

"Like any good BSL lab, we have the ability to maintain this space from above and below," says Faber. "Access to the cells is restricted, so they were designed for minimal maintenance from within."

Lessons Learned

With plans to co-locate a second research tower next to the first, UNMC prepared the site to accommodate both buildings, with the infrastructure and utility services for the future facility put in place during DRC construction. Although not identical, the buildings will be similar in size (with tower number 2 coming in slightly smaller, at 242,000-sf) and appearance, tied together with a shared loading dock where an entrance already awaits the new building.

According to Faber, two things might be different in the new tower as the result of lessons learned in the original.

"We found out that there is a premium on freezer space," he notes. "We have freezer rooms on every floor, but there is a need for more. We might add a type of long-term bulk storage space, or a freezer farm, perhaps below grade, in the new building."

UNMC will also revisit the amount of space required for glass-washing functions.

"We have two large, duplicate glass-wash facilities in the first tower," says Faber, "but this could possibly be downsized because of the increasing use of disposable items."

By Nicole Zaro Stahl

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