When it is completely occupied in July, Genentech Hall will house nearly 1,000 people, including 60 principal investigators in structural and chemical biology, molecular cell and developmental biology, computational biology, chemistry, and biochemistry.

"Science drove the architecture," says Regis Kelly, UCSF's executive vice chancellor and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics. "We have 14 'neighborhoods' in the building with clusters of labs reflecting what's important to us as a community—interactivity. The biochemists threatened not to move in without the neighborhood design."

This massive state-of-the-art facility has humble beginnings. About eight years ago, UCSF started planning to replace University Hall at its Parnassus Campus because the building was not up to current standards to withstand an earthquake. The idea was to build a $20-million, 100,000-sf facility.

"The problem was, who do you get who's willing to leave a very successful campus," says Kelly. "You need a critical mass of researchers for people to be happy there."

As the plans evolved, and fundraising was more successful than anticipated, Genentech Hall quadrupled in size and became the first of 20 buildings the University plans to construct on the site in the next 15 to 20 years, doubling the University's research space. UCSF's 43 acres is only a fraction of the 300-acre Mission Bay development scheme, which will include private biotech firms, housing, and public spaces. Because Genentech Hall lays the groundwork for such an important development, the designers felt a responsibility to make it especially beautiful and welcoming.

An outdoor stone amphitheater at the northeast corner of the building seats nearly 400 people, and the façade and parts of the building interior are covered with 100,000 sf of Italian travertine marble. It's what lies inside that has the scientists excited.

"The marble is lost on them," Kelly says of the researchers.

The interior amenities are much appreciated, however. Labs are outfitted with high-end wooden furnishings custom designed by SmithGroup of San Francisco, the principal architectural firm. Each run of bench is capped at either end by a tech work desk protected from spills by a wing wall. Lab benches have user-adjustable tables to accommodate people with disabilities, and accessible fume hoods and sinks are available, as well.

Labs are filled with natural light because the ceilings slope from 12 feet at the windows, where the HVAC ducts are smaller, to 10 feet toward the building's interior. Ceilings are 9 feet high in support labs and 8 feet in cold rooms.

Near the service elevator, each floor has a storage room specifically for graduate students' bicycles, which would otherwise clutter the labs.

Researchers are Clustered, Not Cloistered

The entire facility, from the grandest scheme to the smallest detail, is designed to encourage interaction and collaboration. The entrance of the building is through the amphitheater and into a glass atrium that exposes all five floors and is topped with a multi-peaked skylight.

The first floor contains a lecture hall with small vestibules; speakers and windows allow people in the vestibules to continue watching and listening to the lecture even as they discuss it, without disturbing the rest of the audience.

Elevator lobbies on each floor open to casual conference areas with small tables and chairs, and a white board for jotting notes during a discussion. Even the staircase is designed for people to see and be seen: It hugs the atrium wall, then winds inward past the casual seating areas before turning out again over the atrium.

"You go into that atrium and take the stairs, and it's like being in a beehive," says Charles S. Craik, professor in the departments of pharmaceutical chemistry, pharmacology, and biochemistry and biophysics. "Research is a very social experience."

A second-floor café projects out over the atrium on one side, and opens to an outside courtyard that overlooks the amphitheater.

Two main laboratory wings to the north and south are joined by a 12-foot-wide, 375-foot-long main corridor - the building's "spine." Its width allows people to comfortably stop and chat rather than squeeze past each other while hurrying to their destination.

Most importantly, UCSF did away with rows of labs lining both sides of a corridor, opting not to use the traditional model that links a primary investigator to a distinct lab separate from the work of other primary investigators and their assistants. In Genentech Hall, primary investigators' offices are grouped together in collegial office suites, two on each wing with a shared conference area between them.

A four-band circulation plan directs people down the spine and onto secondary corridors for service and people.

"It's a very fluid design," says Craik.

The design also allows for a high density of researchers in each lab—240 nsf per person.

It is impossible for researchers to sneak into work undetected. A secondary corridor off the spine leads to an interactive space where researchers gather and eat lunch; cushioned benches open to provide storage space, or a spot to nap while working late. Researchers have to walk through the interactive space in order to enter either the offices or the labs. The gathering area also allows researchers to supervise the lab through large windows.

"The intellectual and social life of the lab revolves around the gathering space," says William L. Diefenbach, senior vice president of SmithGroup.

Researchers share secondary lab spaces, and individual labs are not separated by walls. Even where walls do exist, they often are made of glass, allowing the dispersion of sunlight and creating a sense that the work within is meant to be shared.

"This is not a place to go and hide out," says Craik.

As Science Evolves, So Will the Labs

Two schools of thought were considered when designing Genentech Hall.

"Some people argued for a quick and dirty biotech design that we'd tear down in 25 years," explains Kelly. "But universities have a sense of history. We want the building to last."

Genentech Hall is expected to have an 80-year lifespan. With scientific advances coming at breakneck speed, the building needs to be adaptable.

Researchers involved in the design said their highest priority was phone and data lines, so the building contains 30 percent spare electrical capacity and the ability to double the capacity of the data systems over the next 10 years.

"We are forever under construction," says Russ Akre, UCSF project manager. "That's the nature of research. The University went the extra mile to make this building both flexible and easy to maintain."

The labs themselves are designed to be generic, modular, and adaptable because it wasn't clear until the end who would be located where. The labs are so adaptable that after spending $159 million in construction costs, the University spent only $1 million customizing each lab for its occupants.

The building houses 14,000 sf of computational labs, which can easily be converted to wet labs because the floors contain extra drains. Drains are inexpensive to install during construction and many times more expensive and disruptive to add after the building is occupied.

Piping through the loop corridors, which serve individual rooms, contains T-stubs that are capped off with a valve every second room, allowing for changes in the system without shutting down large areas of the lab. When the University started assigning researchers to specific labs, builders had to add 20 sinks; this proved to be an inexpensive change order because the plumbing was already roughed in.

Scientific changes occur so quickly that some equipment was upgraded during the three-year design period. The NMR, for instance, was initially thought to require steel-reinforced protection surrounding it. In the final analysis, the University purchased a shielded model that requires one-fourth the space in its 50-by-50-foot room. The room is outfitted with a 12-inch "quench tube" in the ceiling carrying gaseous nitrogen to cool the equipment in an emergency. It is constructed on four times the number of pilings as the rest of the building, and the slab floor is 12 inches thick instead of 6 inches, to contain the vibrations caused by traffic.

Akre avoided bidding the data cable contract until the last minute to take advantage of technological advances that would occur during the years between planning and construction.

"Category 5 cable was the best we could do when we bid construction," he explains. "By the time we bid the cable 14 months later, they had come out with a Category 6 that offers greater bandwidth."

Accessible Systems for Easy Maintenance

All mechanical, plumbing, and electrical systems in Genentech Hall were designed to avoid conflicts in the initial construction, Diefenbach explains.

"The location of the pipes is usually left up to the contractors, but ours were coordinated from the outset," he says.

Routine maintenance will be less expensive over time because the building's complicated systems are designed to be accessible. Because of the topography and seismic requirements, the building is constructed on pilings driven into fill. A 4-foot crawl space has been left underneath the building to access the piping that serves the first-floor vivarium.

The vivarium is topped off with a walkable interstitial space that continues over facilities shops, making the vivarium easier to maintain and expandable in the future. The vivarium also contains one cage washer, with room for a second, and a walk-in rack washer, which will be shared with another biomedical research facility 1½ blocks away.

Payback is Evident Immediately

Already researchers are reaping the benefits of Genentech Hall even though it will not be fully occupied until July.

"We've been unable to do things for years," says Kelly. "There's a pent-up demand for space. This will inspire a spurt of creativity and entrepreneurship."

The Parnassus Campus, for example, had a drug design group but no drug-making capacity. Genentech Hall contains 96 fume hoods, which will accommodate the manufacture of experimental drugs.

The building also has spawned a new graduate program in chemistry and chemical biology.

"I'm particularly excited about this," says Craik, the program's director. "We're trying to bring in a new breed of students steeped in both fields. This is something we started in Parnassus with the vision that we'd have this building to move into."

The interaction the building inspires among researchers is not just an architectural theory.

"We have a weekly social hour, and people are always writing things on the white board," he says. "I've already started two new collaborations because of the chemists who I have run into."

One collaboration involves a neurochemist with whom he started chatting as they walked up the stairs together one day. Another new collaborator works on the opposite side of the fifth floor. In Parnassus, they were separated by three floors and rarely saw each other.

"It's very different when you're seeing someone all the time," says Craik. "I can't go a week now without bumping into him four or five times. You ask what people are working on and have follow-up conversations. It's that biofeedback that makes things happen so much faster."

By Lisa Wesel