University of California, San Francisco

In 2005, Flad Architects completed work on a replacement of The Parnassus Seismic Services Building, a 84,000-sf research facility and vivarium located on the medical school campus at the University of California, San Francisco.

The facility includes up to 40,000 animal cages for mice, dogs, pigs, and sheep, a state-of-the-art surgery facility, a transgenic laboratory, and an ABSL-2 suite for large animal studies.

“This replacement building had to be shoehorned into an extremely crowded site,” says Mark Corey, principal of Flad Architects. “We had to work around existing site constraints including neighboring high-rise buildings, loading docks built into hills, and utility plants, all located within a seismic zone.”

Corey explains that to compensate for the small floor plate, the facility rises to six stories and incorporates a number of automated features to increase the efficiency within tight spaces.

“To reduce the number of people needed, the facility uses automated cagewash equipment, bedding waste and supply systems, and material handling equipment,” says Corey.  “In addition the automation also significantly reduces the risk of allergen exposure for all workers.”

Corey adds that because this facility deals with such a diverse range of species, the holding room design uses two central working aisles to accommodate various cage designs as research needs change.

“The layout adds flexibility to operations since it works well with rodent racks or deeper racks that house animals like rabbits,” says Corey. “Keeping the central aisle wide allows workers to pull racks to where the procedure is happening, yet still leave space for someone else to circulate through the room on the other side.”

University of Saskatchewan

Corey points to the University of Saskatchewan as another example of tailoring the design to meet the needs of research dealing with multiple species within the same space.

When completed in 2011, the new 174,000-sf addition to the Academic Health Sciences facility at the University of Saskatchewan will include research space for the schools of medicine and dentistry, a 30,000-sf vivarium, and six stories of research laboratories.

“This project is very complex since the facility needs to accommodate the full spectrum of animal species related to academic health sciences for the entire University,” says Corey. “We are designing holding space and research areas for everything from aquatic specimens to rodents including separate surgery and biocontainment suites for larger animals.”

Plans include space for four independent animal holding suites. Flad completed a study to ensure that one single holding room design will be flexible enough to accommodate all selected species in a variety of housing environments so that the suites can be adapted in the future for changing research needs. All procedure rooms are also being designed to be generic in nature and shared.

The University’s new addition will include a 1,200-sf rodent breeding facility that can accommodate 24 racks of 80 cages each, or 1,920 total cages. This density will meet their program needs for breeding animals well into the future.

To keep operating costs low, Corey explains that the facility will incorporate an operationally efficient heating and ventilation system that uses dual air handling units to supply hot and cold air, reducing the need to constantly cool down air and reheat it when temperature conditions fluctuate.

A.C.