Funded in 2003 by the state of Texas in cooperation with Texas Instruments Inc., the colorful, airy, and infrastructure-intensive Natural Science and Engineering Research Laboratory was fast-tracked in order to comply with an agreement with the governor’s office for first occupancy by December 31, 2006. The compressed planning process was followed by groundbreaking in November 2004, several weeks before the construction documents for the upper floors of the structure (which spans four levels plus basement) were finalized.

The interdisciplinary facility includes enclosed offices for PIs, open cubicles for grad students and post-docs, and multiple interaction areas. The research zones are entirely dedicated to engineering and physical sciences.

“The idea was to bring together researchers who need labs with a lot of infrastructure, which for us includes electrical engineering, material science, biology, chemistry, physics, and neuroscience,” remarks Bruce Gnade, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering and chemistry and the distinguished chair in microelectronics at UT Dallas.

In the abbreviated planning process, faculty representatives first filled out a questionnaire asking them about requisite and wish-list features, then met in a marathon session with the architects and lab planners to consolidate priorities.

“From that we came up with a list of absolute requirements and translated them into a few prototype labs, which developed into three basic kinds of lab modules. The final design was refined after a second iteration with the faculty groups. The process took place over approximately 12 weeks so we could meet our time schedule,” says Gnade, who was recently appointed vice president for research at UTD and played a pivotal role in managing the planning and construction of the project.

Flexibility in Lab Design…

Aside from the non-negotiable deadline and the need to replace an aging cleanroom, the project faced few other constraints. The decision not to incorporate classrooms or department offices in the multidisciplinary building simplified planning and space allocation. (It also enhances security by limiting interior access. A cardkey system keeps unauthorized users out—not necessarily because the research is proprietary, but because of potential hazards in the cleanroom and the research labs, Gnade explains.)

Not surprisingly, uniformity and adaptability were key to producing such a complex facility on such a tight schedule. UTD wanted to maximize the number of faculty groups occupying the building while incorporating flexibility for the long term.

“People move in and out, and the space has to change,” Gnade observes. “An overriding concern was minimizing how much it costs to make those changes.”

Instead of outfitting labs according to discipline, such as chemistry or electrical engineering, the planning team came up with a different denominator: fume hood density. Labs are divided into three levels of density: low, medium, and high. A total of 180 fume hoods are spread out in concentrations as intense as four fume hoods per 800-sf module (typically accommodating one PI and four to six graduate students).

“There really are no designations for departments,” he notes. “Researchers are assigned space by how many hoods they need.”

Along with streamlining the design process, the fume hood scheme is expected to promote interdisciplinary interaction by grouping researchers with similar needs together. This way, teams with different academic specialties will find it easier to engage in collaborative research. For example, electrical engineers working on neuron generation devices spend most of their time crafting parts in the cleanroom, which is on the first floor. The neuroscience researchers who will use those devices are also on the first floor in an adjacent lab.

“Our goal is to make it easy for the electrical engineers to be able to build their parts and then pass them on to the neuroscientists, who can test them and let them know if they work. It is completely non-departmentalized. Hopefully by putting them closer together it will enhance the collaborations,” says Gnade.

…Infrastructure and Furniture…

The intensity of the facility’s infrastructure is evident from the mere fact that mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems accounted for 45 percent of the total $61.5 million construction budget. All mechanical equipment is housed in the basement, with exhaust discharged via shafts at either end and in the center of the building. Fresh, single-pass air is cooled and distributed through the office areas, then cycled through the labs and out through the top.

Electrical switchgear is also in the basement. However, power closets on each floor make it easy to boost power to any of the labs to accommodate heavier-than-normal loads.

Modular, “mix-and-match” lab furniture, custom-designed by Fisher Hamilton, is easily reconfigurable. Many of the cabinets, available in several models, are on wheels, and in many of the labs, tables are not fastened to the floor. The overhead carriers that deliver all the services to the benchtop are also modular. Mechanisms embedded in the concrete floor above provide a support for the suspended shelf units and utilities, offering plug-in access for gases and data lines. This minimizes the challenge of change.

“If a scientist wants to install a piece of eight-foot-high equipment, it’s just a matter of rolling out the tables, removing six bolts, and using a special forklift to take everything down from overhead. In 30 minutes you’ve got the space,” Gnade explains, adding, “Certainly we spent a little more money upfront, but in the long term, as people want to move around, it will be more economical.”

…and Support Space

Another feature that makes the labs so easy to outfit is the generous distribution of support space throughout the building. A group of smaller specialty labs stretches out behind the lab modules, accommodating more specialized equipment, such as that used in laser spectroscopy.

Some of these specialty labs open directly into the linear equipment room, which is essentially a service corridor along the perimeter of the building. At 12 feet wide, however, it furnishes four extra feet of permanent space for gear like refrigerators and centrifuges, while maintaining an eight-foot-wide path for circulation and freight, chemical, and gas delivery. Data outlets are available so devices can be connected to the Internet for monitoring or alarming. Periodic openings in the wall provide access to utility hook-ups should new services like chilled water or compressed air be needed in a lab module.

In addition to their high degree of functionality, the linear equipment rooms are lined with clerestory windows that brighten the space with bountiful natural light.

“Our linear equipment rooms are quite different from the normal utility chase,” comments Gnade.

Common Rooms and Openness

The emphasis on shared facilities for interaction is reflected in the building’s multiple core rooms, from the cleanroom to the high-resolution microscopy and focused ion beam systems housed in the basement (which sits on bedrock for stability). Other common space distributed throughout the lab wings accommodates functions like characterization, autoclaves, and cold rooms.

More casual are the gathering areas furnished with low tables and chairs and wireless Internet access. Many of these spots are clustered around the communicating stairway that runs between the first and second floors, and then the third and fourth floors. (It skips the second-to-third level for fire code reasons.)

From the front curtainwall, the building’s repeating wings, at right angles to each other, progress through several zones—office, corridor, lab, specialty lab—to the linear equipment rooms lining the back perimeter. Glass walls on the offices and labs allow natural light to penetrate to the interior.

“The windows are among the features that make our building different from most other academic labs,” Gnade observes. “Everyone sitting in their offices can literally see all the way through to the back. It is quite a bright place, and we hope that it will be an attraction.”

Making lab interiors visible is also a plus for safety, he adds, because if someone were to be injured, others would be able to see what had happened.

Each floor has two conference rooms, a smaller one at the central core, looking out onto open areas, and a larger one tucked away at one end of the lab wing. Designed to accommodate about 25 people, the larger rooms have balconies that cantilever off the edge of the building. This feature adds to the drama of the colorful façade of anodized stainless steel shingles, which progress from reddish orange to purple throughout the day due to the effects of sunlight.

Office Scheme

Clustered in groups of six per wing along the building front, the glass-walled faculty offices are all a uniform 146 sf, exact replicas of each other. While none of the offices actually has a window to the outside, they all have a pleasant view, which is essentially the same for every one.

In a scheme borrowed from industry, graduate students and post-doctoral scientists are assigned to cubicles in an open-plan arrangement, enjoying the same kind of natural light and views as the permanent faculty. Gnade admits that the students might have to adapt to the open configuration, but based on his experience at Texas Instruments he expects them to like it.

For both safety and space economy, the labs themselves have no sit-down desks. Instead, moveable under-bench cabinets are available with a slide-out writing surface.

“We don’t want to fill valuable lab space with desks, and for safety it’s better that researchers do their reading and writing outside the lab,” he remarks.

Lessons Learned

Aiming to recruit several new PIs, UT Dallas retained about 40 percent of the lab space as a tool to help attract them to the campus. Already, the reserve has gone down by almost ten percent with the hiring of three new faculty members.

Occupancy planning called for a total of 40 research groups and a total of 48 offices, eight of which would be designated for visitors, and 288 students and post-docs in the cubicles. As it turns out, this might have been a miscalculation.

“We don’t have enough faculty offices,” Gnade states. “The total of 40 was based on each PI having eight to 10 graduate students and three or four post-docs. The groups in the building are probably going to be smaller, so if I were to do it again, we would put in more offices.”

The lack of offices for administrative staff is another lament. Early on, they can occupy the vacant faculty offices, but as more people move in they will probably be assigned to the cubicle areas.

A fortunate move that will undoubtedly avert future complications was the decision to enlarge the freight elevator door opening from six feet to 11 feet.

“Especially with so many unknowns associated with building occupants down the road, you can never have too big a freight elevator,” advises Gnade.

By Nicole Zaro Stahl

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