The Experimental Sciences Building at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, for example, was an early iteration of the versatile “open lab” design that is now considered standard in research facilities.

“This lab was a new typology for us,” says Scott Kelsey, managing principal at CO Architects. “It's a highly serviced, very generic loft-like lab environment.”

The 116,500-gsf, $33-million facility—Phase I of a long-term project—was completed in 2003. Its location adjacent to a biological sciences building on the central campus was intended to create a sciences precinct. The building itself is organized around a central courtyard space to create linkages with the biological sciences building.

What set the building apart at the University was that it broke with the age-old departmental model of assigning academic assets, and instead was designed as temporary research space for scientists from material science, soil science, food science, plant science, and Geographic Information System (GIS). The planning team included a group of researchers who were not even slated to use the building, but who ensured that the lab space would be generic enough for a wide range of users and scientific disciplines.

“The idea was to create a new kind of research laboratory that leveraged the strengths in those areas of expertise in order for them to raise their profile and create more opportunities for grants and external partnerships,” says Kelsey. “As teams of researchers came into this building, they would inhabit the labs and offices, and as they finished their grant work, they would move out of the building.”

The building contains five core facilities—soil science, imaging, bioinformatics, proteomics, and shared containment—which serve the broader campus as well as the resident scientists.

By the time CO Architects designed the Microbial Sciences Building at the University of Wisconsin, opened in 2007, the idea of interdisciplinary research had become the norm. The focus in the building was to promote interaction within the lab environment and to emphasize collaboration among researchers throughout the building, explains Jay Hughey, associate principal at CO Architects.

Three existing departments in different microbiology disciplines—medical microbiology, food microbiology, and toxicology and bacteriology—were consolidated to occupy the new 330,000-gsf (190,000 nsf), $100-million facility with the intention of creating a “microbiology powerhouse that would put them on the national stage, create a very strong identity, and enhance economic outreach and industry partnerships,” says Hughey.

CO Architects faced an interesting challenge designing the William H. Foege Bioengineering and Genome Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle at about the same time: Foster collaboration between a traditional 40-year-old department—bioengineering, with 30 full-time faculty—and the new genome sciences department with only five current faculty researchers. The result, completed in early 2006, totals 260,000 gsf and cost just under $100 million.

“This building needed to support a vision of interdisciplinary team research,” says Kelsey. “We looked at this idea of facilities that could be shared to create linkages above and beyond what would occur in the laboratory: core facilities, vivarium, public amenities, meeting space. Those were the glue that would draw this project together.”

Three Labs, Three Solutions

In Texas Tech’s Experimental Sciences Building, the labs support the goal of interdisciplinary, non-department-specific lab space. There are three open lab lofts running along the outside wall of the L-shaped space. Each loft contains 50 percent wet service and is supported by 10 adjacent lab support rooms. There is a 0.5-to-1 lab support ratio. Faculty offices are located across the hall.

Casework in the labs is fixed, which is less expensive but also less flexible, but the generic nature of the design made flexibility less important.

“The consortium of researchers that helped design the lab decided on a prototype lab that worked for all of them,” explains Hughey. “They’re all in the same family of scientists even though it’s interdisciplinary.”

The Microbial Sciences Building at the University of Wisconsin on the other hand, is organized into five self-contained laboratory neighborhoods on each floor, with generic lab modules located around two large atrium spaces. The offices are much less prominent than they are at Texas Tech, while the support spaces are larger and more prominent and include a shared core space.

The casework is very flexible, with only the bases at the ends of the benches being fixed cabinets; the rest of the units are moveable, giving researchers the freedom to customize their lab.

The challenge in this building was to balance the necessity for security around the BSL-3 labs with the desire for collaboration among scientists from different disciplines. The solution was to zone the building vertically, with the more public spaces on the first and second floors, and the secure spaces in the upper floors. The upper floors are open to one another, but not to the public.

Zoning becomes horizontal on each floor to collect a group of labs in a single neighborhood with single security clearance. Shared cores are accessible to everyone on the floor.

“The real impetus for implementing these laboratory neighborhoods was to allow four or five researchers to be grouped together in a single neighborhood—either because they are doing very similar work or because they are doing very different work—so they could collaborate within the research environment itself,” says Hughey. “At the same time, they needed to have a minimum number of entry points with secured access.”

The Foege Building at the University of Washington is a study in contrasts as it accommodates the very different disciplines of genome sciences and bioengineering.

The bioengineering and engineering labs in one wing needed to be highly adaptable to a range of activities, from the instrument-intensive to the more traditional lab benches and casework, both of which could be required in one space. These flexible labs contain three to four lab modules with modular casework, 50 percent wet services, and a 0.35-to-1 lab support ratio. Narrow bands of lab support exist between the labs and two large blocks of offices and computational research suites.

The genome sciences labs, on the other hand, contain four to six contiguous modules with 25 percent wet service, very flexible casework, and 1-to-1 lab support ratio. Lab support spaces are adjacent to the labs, while offices and lounges are concentrated in one corner of the wing.

The labs also contain two innovative kinds of spaces: “hot zones” and “swing spaces.” Swing spaces are flexible environments within the lab loft that can be converted to any use, including wet or computational labs, lab support, or offices. Partitioned by simple drywall, they are included to accommodate the researchers who insist on having their office within the lab, or who need specialized support space directly adjacent to the wet lab.

Hot zones on both ends of each floor have heavy concentrations of infrastructure, including additional power, a variety of power, piped utilities and stub-outs, exhaust for fume hoods, and capacity for additional cooling in case there is a need for lasers or other high-heat load equipment.

“The idea was to install as much infrastructure as we could afford within the lab support core because we knew that when researchers were hired, they might bring a very large piece of equipment that we couldn’t anticipate,” says Kelsey.

Over-designing up front obviates the need for costly retrofitting later.

“We looked at a number of extreme scenarios,” adds Hughey.

Support Cores and Support Spaces

Perhaps the most crucial development in lab design over the past 10 years can be seen in the evolution of support cores and support spaces.

At Texas Tech and the University of Wisconsin, the high-intensity support cores serve not just their individual lab buildings, but also work to attract researchers from throughout the campuses.

Texas Tech has centralized core facilities in biotechnology, imaging (with plans for a virtual reality cave), and bioinformatics, as well as a BSL-3 vivarium and plant growth chambers. There is also an open loft wing with under-floor services to accommodate GIS researchers.

“The cores were seen as interdisciplinary magnets both for the campus and the building,” says Kelsey. “They were located on the first floor in the basement level to draw the larger campus into this facility.”

The core facilities at the University of Washington—including server rooms, glass wash, and a 20,000-sf vivarium—are seen as campus resources for the School of Medicine and the academic campus, so they, too, are located on the ground floor and in the basement.

The University of Wisconsin facility, on the other hand, is not as reliant on core facilities. The building is equipped with a 10,000-sf vivarium with BSL-3 and BSL-3 Ag capability, 22 animal holding rooms, security for Select Agents, and dedicated elevator access to research floors, but the cores are distributed throughout the building so they can be customized for each discipline.

While the support cores are very important to many researchers, a growing number are starting to see little difference between the “lab” and the “lab support space.”

“The reliance on support labs is increasing substantially,” says Hughey. “A lot more specialized lab support can be had right in the lab area.”

“It could be that the definition of support and lab has to do more with the infrastructure that exists within as opposed to the activities,” says Kelsey.

Non-Scientific Amenities

Sometimes what happens outside the lab can be as productive to researchers as what goes on under the fume hood. Another major trend in the design of lab buildings is a growing recognition of the value of meeting and conference spaces, as well as other amenities that might have been considered a waste of space a decade ago.

At Texas Tech, for instance, the emphasis is clearly on the research spaces, and the conference space is relatively small. The building contains a meeting space that can accommodate 60 people, as well as some drop-in spaces, but little else in the way of encouraging interaction.

“The interactive environments, while they are there, are not really pushed as far as in some of our more recent work,” says Kelsey.

The Wisconsin facility, on the other hand, has five conference rooms and 15 lab meeting rooms, including conference and breakout rooms on each floor, and faculty office blocks and meeting rooms.

“In terms of interaction space, the researchers could not have enough of it,” says Hughey.

Research buildings are increasingly designed to welcome the outside world rather than keep them at bay, which helps to foster partnerships with private industry and public institutions.

“One of the most important elements of research interaction space was the development of a large conference center on the ground floor, with 450-, 200- and 100-person lecture rooms,” says Kelsey. “These are high-end conference rooms for meetings with industry partners.”

The University of Washington also has a meeting space large enough for 200 people.

Lessons Learned

While each institution finds its own path to interdisciplinary research, there are certain clear trends in the design of science buildings. Planners are rethinking the campus scale and how the sciences fit in on campus, by better integrating the sciences and elevating their identity. They are focusing on open spaces, creating science quads, and incorporating pedestrian malls to promote interaction. These spaces can include demonstration gardens and covered arcades that welcome the public.

In order to promote collaboration, the facilities themselves need to become the catalyst for the exchange of ideas, says Hughey. They need to include core facilities, as well as both formal and non-programmed meeting spaces. It’s not good enough to fit spaces in where there’s an unused corner on the floorplate. A variety of spaces is needed to provide the technology required for high-end colloquia as well as amenities like food and coffee.

In the labs themselves, flexibility is the key.

“Having a ubiquitous, heavily structured lab is not the right answer,” says Kelsey. “You have to move towards more of a zoned idea. These labs are also becoming more dry; they are becoming more computational, so that has an impact on the systems.”

“The bottom line is, there is no silver bullet for interdisciplinary science,” concludes Hughey. “A range of solutions must be explored and tested to find the right program to support cutting-edge science.”

By Lisa Wesel

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