The educational spaces in the 270,000-sf facility are similarly impressive, ranging from a ground-breaking Pharmacy Practice Laboratory and a Human Patient Simulator Suite to a 200-seat auditorium equipped for distance learning and a technology infrastructure delivering voice, data, and video signals to nearly every room in the building.

Overall, the six-story structure displays few traces of the 200-plus value-engineering design changes that enabled it to move off the drawing board after construction costs for the preliminary plan came in 30 percent over budget.

"Today's students love spending time here," says Dean Schmoll, who arrived on the Detroit campus in 2001, the year before the building opened. "We have a very functional, state-of-the-art facility that is aesthetically very pleasing. It is not evident to anyone that value-engineering took place."

Partnering to Lower Costs

Accommodating offices, classrooms, and extensive laboratory space for training pharmaceutical and health science professionals other than physicians and nurses, the building was originally envisioned as having a single-story auditorium and intermingled offices and labs. The university selected Neumann/Smith & Associates, in conjunction with HDR Architecture Inc. and the Turner-Brinker Team, to bring the facility, originally estimated in the range of $70 million, to life.

"With this state-funded project, our challenge was to find cost-saving solutions to meet a fixed budget of $51 million," says design principal Kenneth Neumann of the eponymous Detroit-based architecture firm.

The three firms, which had a long history of collaboration, worked closely with the owner and users to move the project forward. They expressed their support of a team approach in a formal Partnering Charter signed by key personnel pledging to "work together to meet the pragmatic considerations of budget, schedule, and program by trusting in and listening to each other, being open and honest, maintaining open lines of communication, sharing ideas, maintaining a positive attitude, and by living up to our declared commitments."

An outside facilitator led several team sessions at various intervals throughout the project—the end of schematic design, the beginning of construction, and on through the building process.

"We all worked to find incremental ways to make this building happen," says Neumann. "It wasn't just the architect alone with a lightning bolt strike of inspiration."

Representatives from the trades and pivotal APHS personnel, not just the college's facilities staff, also contributed significantly to the group's progress.

"Often the people who use a building don't know that you have to fit beams, ducts, sprinklers, lighting, and so on in a certain amount of space," comments Neumann. "When they understood the technical things, and we understood how they wanted to use the building, the process became much easier."

No Miracles

While every last detail was important in shaving costs, the design team generated the most significant chunk of savings by reducing the overall volume of the building. Shrinking the footprint cut down on the roof area and number of walls, making the plan more efficient.

The freestanding auditorium was incorporated back into the main building block and tucked into an area on the lower level. Although no longer a showcase immediately visible from the exterior, it still fulfills the original functional requirements, with the same number of seats, ceiling heights, and amenities, Neumann points out.

Stacking office and lab components vertically made mechanical and electrical systems more efficient as well as more adaptable for changing technology. The mechanical room was split up and relocated to a basement and penthouse scheme, avoiding the need for long runs of expensive piping and ductwork and trimming the number of mechanical and electrical shafts from the original five down to three.

"There is less square footage in corridors and more in useful space," says Neumann. "These efficiencies helped reduce the building's price tag."

Exterior Economies

Designers were both pragmatic and creative in refashioning the structure on the exterior. On the practical side, the slimmed-down footprint meant that the ratio of volume to outer skin could be maximized, which in turn lowered skin costs as well as operating costs.

Another design change entailed using precast concrete panels with brick facing instead of a more expensive brick veneer to deliver the desired brick façade. This approach had several financial and time-saving advantages. First, the inherent load-bearing capability of the precast panels kept weight off the structural system, reducing the size of the perimeter steel frame to further push costs down.

"This is not the usual installation method," says Neumann. "Typically, such panels are hung from the structure, but because the lower panels could accept the weight of those stacked on top, we were able to break the norm and save some money."

Additionally, the use of precast panels helped accelerate the construction timeline, another money-saving tactic. The two-story high panels were trucked in and lifted into place, allowing the construction crew to complete the building enclosure with minimal delay. This process was significantly faster than traditional brick-laying, plus it allowed the work to take place in the dead of winter, without regard to weather conditions.

The redesign also regularized the building exterior so all precast panels were alike, with window openings placed in a repeating pattern.

"Making one form for 40 panels is a lot cheaper than making 40 molds that are different," observes Neumann. "Thinking about the project from a production point of view also helped the budget.

"This isn't rocket science," he continues, "but it does require talking out the issues and figuring out a solution. The overall process was made much easier by teaming with professionals from a major contractor who really know their stuff."

Teaching Innovations

To separate heavily used public spaces from limited-access research areas, the Applebaum building is divided horizontally into two, three-story segments. Labs, meeting rooms, and associated offices are housed on the upper three floors, while the lower three levels (one below grade) accommodate classrooms, human performance labs, the auditorium, and student support spaces. By clustering the high-traffic areas, students and faculty only have to travel up or down one floor to their destinations once they enter the building.

Open to the entry level above, the below-grade commons is equipped with tables and chairs, vending machines, a kitchenette, and other features that encourage facility users to congregate and interact. Also on this floor is the Learning Resource Center, which includes a library, a computer lab, copy machines, and comfortable seating where students can read and prepare for class.

The didactic spaces reflect the school's emphasis on active learning, an approach that Dean Schmoll staunchly advocates as enhancing the educational experience.

A Human Patient Simulator Suite replicates four distinct medical environments: operating room, emergency room, critical care unit, and pediatrics rooms, the latter two of which will be outfitted in the future. Each of the currently functioning teaching labs has a high-tech mannequin that can be programmed to assume any human physiological state—from blood loss to brain trauma—affording students the opportunity to practice hands-on care while instructors observe from behind a one-way window.

"Right now, the mannequins are used extensively by our nurse anesthesia students," says Dean Schmoll. "In the future we hope most of the programs in the college will be using them."

Focusing on patient education and interaction, the building's innovative CVS Pharmacy Practice Lab is unlike any other pharmacy program in the U.S., according to the Dean. Several private side rooms allow pharmacists-in-training to screen and consult with "patients," giving them guidance on such topics as sterile techniques and special compounds.

"The lab is geared to our vision of the future," she says. "Most people think of pharmacy as a dispensary, but we are preparing students for a much broader role, providing oversight in the management of patient medications, both prescription and over-the-counter. You will soon see pharmacies in the community being redesigned to provide private areas for this interaction."

Research Space

Research activities at APHS run the gamut from investigations into diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's, and asthma to issues of workplace safety and adaptive learning. The upper three floors of wet labs feature fume hoods and large open spaces that foster collaboration by accommodating multiple researchers.

"These labs handle all different levels of biosafety research, analyzing the effectiveness of various antibiotics on organisms, studying pharmacodynamics—the way drugs are absorbed and the amount received from a given dosage," explains Dean Schmoll.

Labs on the lower floors are devoted primarily to behavioral studies. For example, one project explores the reaction times of the elderly and disabled under simulated driving conditions-day, night, sun, snow, rural roads, and highways.

Even with such extensive programmatic needs, as the building project wound down the school had some funds available to incorporate upgrades such as the wood paneling and artwork.

"You can't say we just cut the glitz out," remarks Neumann. "This is a first-class university building. The final design gives the university all the desired program elements while realizing a 25 percent cost reduction. It was just a matter of tweaking a million little things."

By Nicole Zaro Stahl

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