“It’s not good practice to have animals involved in research in public spaces,” says Russell Chernoff, partner in Chernoff Thompson Architects in Vancouver, British Columbia. “People can suffer severe problems, and as a consequence, there’s a liability to the institution or to the company associated with that building.”

Vivariums are also expensive to build, so it makes sense to design them with enough flexibility to accommodate future expansion and emerging sciences, with minimal disruption to the researchers and exposure to the service crew. Chernoff has helped design vivariums in three facilities in British Columbia which address these issues in different ways.

Less Space Requires More Efficiency

The vivarium in St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver was saddled with extreme space limitations in a turn-of-the-century building with 11-foot floor-to-floor vertical height and a 9,450-sf floorplate. The space had to accommodate conventional, biocontainment, bioexclusion, and quarantine areas for mice, rats, guinea pigs, and rabbits.

“It’s basically four small facilities in one,” says Chernoff. “We would have liked more space, but we were told that was all we were going to get.”

In this case, the goals were to use the space as efficiently possible, and to make it flexible enough to expand the barrier within the same floorplate. A lot was accomplished simply by using the most space-efficient equipment, such as ventilated cages that allow multiple researchers to share the same holding room at a higher density of animals while maximizing protection for both people and animals. A holding room measuring 7' 5" x 8' 3" that could accommodate 200 mice in standard cages can hold 630 mice in ventilated cages, or could hold multiple species.

The hospital’s facility manager also found a pass-through bio-safety cabinet to install in the wall between two holding rooms. It can be used by researchers in both holdings rooms, as a bio-safety cabinet or for cage changing.

“Cage changing can occur on one side, then close off the cabinet and change a cage on the other side,” says Chernoff. “We have a piece of equipment doing double duty, but it is also more demanding on the mechanical system and requires a higher level of diligence with respect to standard operating procedures.”

The change rooms in that lab also do double duty by serving both barrier and non-barrier spaces. This allowed the elimination of one male and one female changing room, but also requires stricter operating procedures.

One element that Chernoff has included in several of his buildings is interior walls of storefront window glazing rather than drywall. This opens up very small spaces, makes the workplace safer because it adds visibility, and can be disassembled easily with little dust or disruption. If the animals require alternate lighting environments, the shatter-resistant laminated glass can be covered with a red film or with metal panels. At $20 or $25 per sf, the cost is substantially higher than drywall ($10 per sf) or masonry ($12 to $14), but the total square footage used is relatively low. Final cost for the renovation was $309 per sf.

Chernoff’s design team used storefront window glazing at St. Paul’s to subdivide one small holding room in the biocontainment area into three 4' x 6' cubicles. Each cubicle is its own separate mini-environment, with unique temperature conditions, pathogens, and species. The cubicle doors open out, which draws air in and maintains the appropriate air differential with the main room.

After two years in operation, the St. Paul’s Hospital vivarium is in the first phase of its possible configurations, Chernoff explains. One side of the room has the inclusion, or containment barrier, which is needed to keep contaminants from escaping. The fastest growing field of animal research, however, involves specially bred transgenic animals, which must be kept pure from outside contaminants in an exclusion barrier. The exclusion barrier is designed to expand in phases. The space contains discrete clusters that include an anteroom, a holding room, and a procedure room, with many extra doors between them. These doors can be locked or unlocked to include more of these clusters in the containment barrier as the need increases.

“It is not hugely disruptive to convert from non-barrier to barrier space,” he says. “We just have to lock and unlock doors, and adjust the air dampers for positive air flow.”

University Vivariums Designed for Flexibility

The vivariums at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver and at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, are both located in multi-disciplinary research buildings and contain conventional, BSL-2, bioexclusion, and quarantine spaces, as well as future space for BSL-3. The vivariums are owned by the universities, and the investigators are tenants, which means they can be required to share holding rooms in order to maximize efficiency.

The 18,000-sf vivarium at Simon Fraser was designed for rodents, small mammals, birds, and pigs, but the bird and pig programs were never implemented. Each of the 16 holding rooms has a built-in anteroom and procedure room in order to minimize the movement of animals and to facilitate the future conversion to barrier space. The walls can be easily shifted or removed if a researcher has no need for a separate procedure room, or requires a larger one to hold more equipment.

It is just as important to keep maintenance people out of the vivarium as it is to keep the animals in, so the services that feed the space should be accessible from outside the barrier. The research building at Simon Fraser University has what Chernoff calls “the poor man’s interstitial space”—six feet of space above the deck which is accessible by an outside door. Cost for the SFU fit-out was $368 per sf.

The University of Victoria has about 14,000 sf dedicated to mice, rats, rabbits, and cats, housed in nine holding rooms bordered by clusters of procedure rooms. Each holding room has a pair of procedure rooms between them, and a third procedure and an anteroom along the perpendicular wall, forming a T of procedure space around each holding room. The procedure rooms between the holding rooms, which are walled with storefront glazing, are designed to be flexible to take on additional equipment or cages if needed. The rooms can even be further subdivided to contain as many as five cubicles.The adjacent procedure and anterooms will retain those uses for the life of the building. Final cost for this fit-out was $370 per sf.

The University also installed high-efficiency cagewashers in order to accommodate future expansion while using the same equipment. The washers have the capacity to do the work of a conventional washer in one-third the time and for 40 percent of the cost per cage. The units also can use vapor phased hydrogen peroxide, if decontamination becomes necessary.

“One of the really neat ideas about the high-efficiency cagewasher is that the next cycle prewash uses the last cycle rinse,” says Chernoff. “Think of the energy savings over the life of that facility.”

It is possible to achieve both flexibility and efficiency over the long term by taking advantage of this kind of equipment, and by avoiding hard-built construction, concludes Chernoff.

“We’re able to keep animals in the vivarium and out of public areas, to respond to changing research needs with minimal disruption, and increase the barrier in non-traditional ways,” he says. “In addition, we can house more animals of multiple species in their own separate environments. We’ve been able to have efficient maximized space use over the life of the building.”

By Lisa Wesel