"UHN did not have the capital funds to put up its own base building," explains Ian McDermott, manager of research facilities for UHN. "What UHN did was enter into a 30-year lease agreement, which allowed a non-profit group to secure the $100-million bond to put up the base building."

UHN is comprised of Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto General Hospital, and the Toronto Western Hospital, and is affiliated with the University of Toronto. The hospitals' three research institutes, with $156 million in research funding, employ 468 principal investigators and more than 2,200 staff, and occupy 480,000 sf of dedicated space outside of the clinical areas. Some of the research programs include microarray; proteomics; bioengineering; imaging technologies, including microscopy, micro PET, micro CT, and NMR; medicinal chemistry; flow cyclometry; and animal facilities.

Over the past several years, UHN has undertaken a $350-million redevelopment of its clinical campus, which identified spaces that were no longer required. Those spaces were sold to Medical and Related Sciences (MaRS), a not-for-profit corporation founded by leaders from Canada's academic, business, and scientific communities. Its mission is to accelerate the rate of successful commercialization of new discoveries in Canada.

MaRS is developing 1.2 million sf of new research facilities in a Discovery District comprised of several towers. One of those research towers is UHN’s 15-story Toronto Medical Discovery Tower, which is scheduled for occupancy in August 2005.

The ground floor is reserved for retail space, and the top three floors will be subleased to the Hospital for Sick Children, with parking on the lower two levels, below grade. In the short term, UHN plans to occupy the 10 middle floors and is actively seeking another medical research tenant for the 12th floor. Seven or eight years from now, UHN will likely require the top 14 floors, says McDermott.

Financial Solution Creates Design Challenges

While the lease-back arrangement made the project financially feasible for UHN, it limited the design flexibility that might have been possible with an owner-occupied building.

The size of the Toronto Medical Discovery Tower was dictated by the property size and municipal regulations imposed by the City of Toronto. The building is 500,000 sf, with about 400,000 sf of laboratory space, and an average floorplate of approximately 26,000 sf.

"This was essentially what we called a New York core and shell," says McDermott. "Slab-to-slab, base core areas, and a curtainwall cost of $210 per square foot. We are dealing with the slab-to-slab height of 14.5 feet, which works quite well for most of the laboratory areas, but it is a bit shy for animal facilities, and there are some issues around the BSL-3 areas."

Ventilation is done on a floor-by-floor basis. There is a central exhaust, and there is dedicated supply on each floor. Floor loading is 75 to 150 pounds per square foot with some areas of higher density. The building requires specialty exhaust risers because it houses multiple tenants on multiple floors, says McDermott.

"It is important that the second floor doesn't use up all of the risers, or that the 14th floor doesn't take up all of the space," he says. "The building has dedicated areas on each floor to allow for these risers."

The tower is also designed with a lot of glass on both the exterior and interior walls. The interior glass windows and walls, some of which are frosted for privacy, create a visual connection from the hallways to the labs, and then from the labs to the offices. The exterior windows provide natural lighting in the labs and offices, which creates a pleasant work environment, but it also creates design challenges.

"We need to worry about the fact that this whole building is glazing from the outside all the way around," says McDermott. "The only place you don't have glazing is the mechanical spaces, which is great for researchers working in laboratories or in offices, but not good for BSL-3 and animal facilities, where you want to keep everything as much as possible in the center."

Windows on a BSL-3 lab make it difficult to control the critical conditions of heat and humidity; in the animal labs, it makes it impossible to control the lighting for animals who need to be "told" when to sleep and when to be awake.

Special Construction Required for Specialized Labs

The exterior windows are not the only challenge. The tower has multi-species animal facilities on the sixth floor, housing non-primates as small as mice and as large as pigs; different lighting, temperature, and humidity settings are needed for each species.

"For us it is important that we have housing and services in one contiguous area," explains McDermott. "We didn't want to send the cagewashing down to another floor."

To accommodate that, the sixth floor has redundant plumbing systems and four isolated suites to house animals for the building's multiple tenants.

"We needed to have flexible housing with our ventilation systems," he says. "We wanted to have individual suites that would allow a tenant to come in and say, 'Hey, that is my area and I am not integrating.' That was an issue more for the private sector."

The BSL-3 labs containing multiple pathogens are on the seventh floor.

"Everybody will tell you that if you want to do a BSL-3, you have to have an interstitial floor," says McDermott. "If you want to do an animal facility, you have to have an interstitial floor."

But the slab-to-slab construction does not allow for an interstitial space between floors.

"We have solved that by installing combined mechanical spaces on the sixth floor within our animal facilities, and our BSL-3 on the seventh floor," he says. "So the mechanical space is right underneath our BSL-3 facility."

There is also the issue of safely moving materials between the two floors, so they installed a designated elevator just between the sixth and seventh floors. It is a lift elevator, so it does not cut into the eighth floor.

There is only one general-use service elevator, in addition to six passenger elevators, which McDermott says is already proving insufficient.

"My advice to people is go with more than one service elevator," he says. "This is going to be a bit of an issue in terms of movement and material in and out of the building, but at this point, there is not much we can do."

The NMR suite also required a creative solution to fit within the confines of a slab-to-slab construction. The building initially was designed to contain one 800-mhz NMR on the third floor. There is only 14.5 feet of clearance between each slab, but the magnet is 17.5 feet tall. To accommodate it, the middle of the NMR suite rises to two stories, cutting into the fourth floor, where the NMR researchers work. The concrete slabs above and below are within the magnet field, as are the center grids of the second and fourth floors, so they have to be reinforced with non-ferrous rebar made of glass fiber reinforced polymer. Concrete I-beams are installed in the floor to support the 15,400-pound magnet.

When they decided to then install a second 800-mhz magnet, the concrete I-beams were no longer strong enough; it necessitated the installation of three poured concrete support walls in an "I" configuration in the middle of the second floor.

"The sheer walls offer vibration and building sway isolation, so you don't have to have floating platforms in the area," says McDermott. "But you have to worry about mechanical systems on the second, third, and fourth floors because of the magnetic field. The mechanicals had to be located outside that center grid on those floors."

With all of these specialized environments, whether for imaging equipment or biological pathogens, it is essential to keep in mind that the tenants are scientists and not architects, McDermott points out. They likely are not aware of the structural and mechanical requirements of their research.

"Different research programs demand different environments," he says. "That may seem obvious, but it is not to the researchers. If you are working with a research community, try to educate them as much as possible. These are trained scientists who understand science, not buildings."

Flexibility Retained Within Labs

While the base building restricts some design possibilities, they were able to build flexibility into the labs themselves.

"Every floor of the UHN facility contains flexible lab space," says McDermott. "We kept the fixed elements along the walls that we knew were going to be constructed, or along the column areas," says McDermott. "For the benches, we went with a modular, moveable system on self-leveling gliders. Don't go with a mobile work bench on casters, because they cannot be leveled properly."

The benches themselves also are designed to be flexible: The shelves are adjustable, and the countertop can be adjusted for height or removed altogether. A drawer unit that fits under the counter is on casters, and contains a work surface on top. The electrical panel also is adjustable to accommodate deeper equipment that requires two benches placed back-to-back.

Keep in mind that researchers use the term "generic" lab to mean "adaptable," cautions McDermott. "To them it does not mean open, flexible laboratories. It means 'Hey, I can do whatever I want here now.' That is not actually what we think of as generic."

Uniquely Integrated Team Ensures Accountability

Even with a good design and competent builders, glitches can arise in any construction project. The problem is, by the time these glitches become apparent after several years of use, the designers and builders are long gone. The designer hands over responsibility to the builder, who hands over responsibility to the operator.

"We always run into problems with these handovers," says McDermott.

To prevent that, UHN created an integrated team consisting of UHN, the Hospital for Sick Children, and a new joint venture called ABE, made up of AMEC, the designer; Black & McDonald, the operator; and EllisDon, the builder.

"They have to make sure they design, build, and operate that facility to meet our research needs for at least five years," says McDermott. "AMEC cannot walk away from the design in August. The same is true of EllisDon. In two years, if we have a problem that arises because of a poor construction choice, they'll still be on board.

"This has been done before in the oil industry, but it is unique in our field," he says.

McDermott said the arrangement is working very well, but concedes that it was not easy to get the builders on board.

"It forces the contractors to open their books," he says. "But this is a pain/gain arrangement. If anyone goes over budget, everyone shares in the overage; if you come in under budget, everyone shares in the gain.

"And integrated teams create many, many chiefs," notes McDermott. "You have many people who are all making decisions, and it is very hard to keep that in control. But they have the potential to yield great operational rewards."

By Lisa Wesel

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