The four-story, 156,000-sf interdisciplinary facility will bring together several nanotechnology and materials-development groups currently housed in various parts of the Cornell campus. One of these, the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF), is the oldest federally sponsored nanotechnology center in the U.S. Duffield Hall will feature a 20,000-gsf Class 1,000 cleanroom, about three times the size of the existing clean space in Knight Laboratory, as well as providing a characterization suite and flexible laboratories. Construction started in June 2001. Phased occupancy is scheduled to begin in August 2003, with final occupancy to follow in June 2004.

Like the CNF, Duffield Hall will be accessible to a variety of disciplines. Research subjects range from astronomy to plant pathology, with projects coming from established disciplines like microelectronics, physics, and materials research, as well as emerging fields like integrated optics and microelectromechanical structures.

"Researchers will produce one-of-a-kind devices here, then take them back to their labs," says Robert Stundtner, project director for Duffield Hall. "For instance, someone trying to get nerve cells to grow on a silicon substrate will go through the process of building the device at Duffield, then continue the research elsewhere."

Duffield Hall will support four areas of nanoscale research: nanofabrication (making small devices and structures), nanocharacterization (identifying small things), materials growth (synthesizing materials at the molecular level), and nanobiotechnology (life science research at the dimension of DNA molecules). For more information on nanotechnology and its facilities implications, see Making Room for Nanotechnology.

Pre-construction planning—a complex task for any research building—was compounded for Duffield Hall both by the interdisciplinary nature of the building and the technical demands of nanotech research. Long before the project broke ground, Cornell put together a team to build Duffield Hall, as well as planning how to effectively communicate about the project with the University's internal and external constituencies, particularly during the municipal approvals process. The project team conducted extensive benchmarking of similar facilities, both on the Cornell campus and around the world, refining criteria for the building's location, organization, and materials handling strategies. After the project was already underway, New York State adopted a more stringent building code, which made for a number of changes to the program.

Build a Team to Build a Building

"Projects like this are very high profile and naturally everyone involved wants it to succeed," says Stundtner. "But you do need to literally build the team to build the building, particularly with an interdisciplinary facility like Duffield Hall."

The client team for Duffield Hall includes the vice president of facilities and campus services; the dean and the assistant dean of the College of Engineering; the University architect; the director of University planning; and the director of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. This group picks the design firm for the project. Once selected, the design firm becomes part of the team selecting the construction firm.

Cornell assigns each building project a full-time project manager to provide overall cradle-to-grave leadership. Duffield Hall also has a project coordinator who provides administrative and coordination support to the project manager and the project team as a whole. Once construction begins, Cornell also assigns a full-time construction manager to the project.

Other stakeholders to the process include the University's trade shops, facilities management group, and environmental health & safety department, as well as the College of Engineering community, the university community as a whole, and the city of Ithaca.

"Healthy team relationships are an important component to a complex project like Duffield Hall," says Stundtner. "We celebrate successes and find opportunities to enjoy a good meal at the end of a long day of project meetings."

Stundtner says that project managers are trained as group facilitators and view every project meeting is an opportunity for team building, particularly when a project is challenged financially or by some design issue. Specific meetings are devoted to team building exercises and the University even brings in professional facilitators.

Selecting the Building Team

While the need for nanotechnology experience did limit the field of potential A/E firms somewhat, Stundtner says the A/E and CM selection process was otherwise essentially the same.

"We do our homework and create a long list of firms with relevant experience and then send out the RFQs," says Stundtner. "Sometimes we throw in a ringer, such as a really good architectural design firm with no relevant experience, along with a really strong A/E firm that are great at labs, but not noted for design. Then we see if they connect the dots and team up. Similarly, we invite both local and national construction management firms and see if they team up.

After sifting through the packages, Cornell invites a short list of design firms to the campus for a briefing on the project and tour of the existing facilities. A week or two later, the proposed teams (with a maximum of five individuals per team) return to make a 90-minute presentation demonstrating how they would approach the project. No designs are allowed. The University makes a decision before negotiating a fee.

Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership of Los Angeles, was selected from among twenty design firms from across the U.S.

For construction candidates, Cornell adds a situational interview to the selection process.

"With Cornell faculty and staff role playing, the candidate has a problem to solve in a limited amount of time. Usually, there is some deliverable: estimate, phasing, logistics, etc.," says Stundtner.

A joint venture of St. Louis-based McCarthy Builders and Welliver McGuire of Elmira, N.Y., was selected to provide construction management and general contracting services for the project.

Proactive Communications

Duffield Hall is a major three-year construction project happening right in the middle of the engineering college. As a result, professors are worried about the impacts on class schedules, how students will get to class, and their ability to teach and conduct research. The fact that hazardous chemicals will be used in the building could raise concerns both on campus and off.

Before any permits were applied for or any holes were dug, the project team drew up a communications strategy for Duffield Hall. Cornell hired risk communications specialist Dr. Peter Sandman to conduct a one-day seminar for Cornell's legal department, public relations group, community relations office, and the project team, approximately 100 people in all. The seminar was based on Sandman's formula "risk = hazard + outrage."

"If you don't manage the potential outrage, the perceived risk in the project can make it very difficult to get approval," says Stundtner. "So you don't wait for people to just discover what you're doing, you go out and tell them in a very open and proactive way. You invite feedback and comment."

The plan addresses both internal and external constituencies. Internally, the communications plan provides information that energizes alumni to give and lets the administration know that progress is being made.

"It makes passage of all the necessary approvals that much easier when there's a buzz and excitement about the project," says Stundtner.

The communications plan also addresses external constituencies: community and neighborhood groups and municipal approval bodies. Stundtner says that Cornell decided that the best approach was to keep the community completely informed about the project and provide very structured opportunities for comment. They also invested time in community outreach by meeting with neighborhood groups and other interested parties.

"You have to do a lot of listening and make yourself available," says Stundtner. "Sometimes it's simply a matter of saying, 'It's going to be dirty, noisy, and inconvenient. Here's what we're going to do to mitigate that.'"

To avoid a contentious municipal approval process, Cornell asked the city of Ithaca to impose an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the project. The EIS describes the program and the various systems in the building and how the University is working to keep the building safe.

The City of Ithaca gave the public access to a great deal of information during the approval process, including site development plan review, environmental impact statement, the findings statement, and preliminary and final site approvals.

"We weren't afraid to go on local television and say that, yes, we were planning to use highly toxic materials in the building and we think we can demonstrate that we can handle them safely," says Stundtner. "When people checked it out, they found that we had done our homework."

So far the effort at openness seems to have paid off.

"We finished the municipal approvals process months sooner than we anticipated, 11 months from start to finish," says Stundtner. "We had set a goal of 12 months but were planning for 18."

Web Site and Other Tools

Communication tools for the project include newsletters and posters, and provide specific email and Web addresses to make it easier for people to learn about the project and ask questions.

One particularly helpful tool for promoting the project is a comprehensive Web site. In addition to viewing details and updates, visitors to the project Web site can download the environmental impact statement and ask questions about a host of issues related to the project.

A steerable Web cam offers around-the-clock views of the construction site. The Web cam collects still images from a number of points every 40 minutes. These images are being saved to create a QuickTime movie of the project, making the entire project viewable in about 20 minutes.

"At the end we'll have a nice record of the construction process," he says, adding that the cost for purchasing and installing the Web cam came to about $9,000 total, which Stundtner says is a bargain considering the amount of use it gets.

Lessons Learned From CNF

Currently occupying about 6,500 gsf of clean space in Knight Laboratory, the CNF is a nanoscale machine shop that accommodates a variety of cleanroom tools. The CNF space served as a template for much of Duffield Hall's programming. For example, the faculty initially requested a Class 100 cleanroom for Duffield Hall.

Cleanrooms are rated for purity according to particle size and particle count. Each rating class (1 through 100,000) specifies the number of foreign particles per cubic foot (or cubic liter) of air. Lower numbers represent smaller particles and, by extension, cleaner rooms. Class 100 is suitable for industrial-scale production facility, rather than the one-off prototype production that will take place in Duffield Hall. When a consulting firm was hired to certify the CNF cleanroom, the particle sizes were too large to qualify the space as Class 10,000.

"We were able to push back on that and demonstrate that they were doing great research in a fairly dirty cleanroom," says Stundtner.

As a result, the cleanroom in Duffield Hall will be a Class 1,000, which Stundtner points out is a significant savings to the project, since the difference in first costs and operating costs for a Class 100 cleanroom, versus a Class 1,000 cleanroom is enormous.

The clean space in the CNF has hard walls and the faculty wanted something more flexible.

"We selected a bay-and-chase design for reasons of space efficiency, as well as cost," says Stundtner. "You don't need raised floor or interstitial space in this kind of facility. There are also safety and operational reasons to break the space up into smaller areas based on function. Over the long term, the chase walls can move to accommodate changes in tools or function."

Given the occasionally cramped nature of CNF after more than 20 years in operation, the faculty wanted room for growth in the new building. The cleanroom space was programmed anticipating that it would be about 50 percent populated at the time the building is occupied. Stundtner notes that the current soft semiconductor market has created bargain prices for used tools. As a result, equipment purchases by the CNF lab manager are on a pace to have the cleanroom fully populated by move-in.

The CNF cleanroom has windows that allow visitors to view the research activities within. Likewise, the new cleanroom in Duffield Hall will have several windows into the cleanroom.

"Visibility helps to tell your story when you're conducting research," says Stundtner.

Fostering Interaction and Collaboration

Cornell had the option of locating Duffield Hall away from the main campus, which would have eased site constraints and potentially made the project easier to sensitive campus and city constituencies. However, benchmarking found that remote facilities of this kind tend to be underutilized and Duffield was given its central campus location.

"They might be great facilities but there weren't many people in them," says Stundtner.

Instead Duffield Hall is being built next to Knight Laboratory, the building it will replace. To foster social interaction and create opportunities for collaboration, a large atrium will connect Duffield Hall with two adjacent structures on the Engineering campus, Phillips Hall and Upson Hall. Collaboration spaces with comfortable furniture, ample power, and data connections are located in the atrium and throughout the building.

There are no resident faculty in Duffield, both to inhibit any territoriality that might develop and as a reflection of the nature of nanotechnology research, which tends to involve multiple disciplines.

"The cleanroom and characterization spaces are shared resources," says Stundtner. "While there are laboratories on the second and third floors for research, we chose not to create permanent research groups in the building in order to extend the notion of Duffield as a specialized resource that you could move into for the duration of a project, however long that might be."

Low Vibration and EMFs

Nanoscale research requires quiet, stable facilities with very low vibration and minimal electromagnetic fields. Nanocharacterization, photolithography, and e-beam equipment all require very low vibration environments to operate effectively. The slab-on-grade portion of Duffield Hall's cleanroom is designed to achieve vibrations of less than 50 microinches per second. By comparison, Stundtner points out that a low-power optical microscope requires vibrations of less than 3,000 microinches per second to produce a stable image.

The remainder of the cleanroom space—located on elevated slab over mechanical space housing the building's make-up air handling unit—will achieve vibrations of less than 500 microinches per second. The second and third floor labs in Duffield will have vibration ratings 500 to 750 microinches per second.

Stray electromagnetic fields are also problematic for nanotech research equipment. Concrete for the slab-on-grade is fiberglass reinforced. Columns, beams, and decks for the floors above still posed potential difficulty since metal structures can pick up electromagnetic currents and transmit them into research areas.

"We couldn't find non-ferrous, non-conductive materials for these that would allow for a reasonably sized structure," says Stundtner. "We chose to epoxy coat the rebar, which creates a non-conductive jacket around the reinforcing steel."

Before pouring any concrete, researchers were allowed to test the rebar for stray fields.

"This way they could assure themselves that the epoxy had remained intact during the installation process," says Stundtner.

Accommodating Hazardous Materials

One of the key challenges of the Duffield Hall project has been accommodating hazardous research materials like arsine and silane that are commonly used in nano-scale research.

"You need to be able to receive these materials, store them, and distribute them," says Stundtner. "You need to know if they're problematic."

Duffield Hall features segregated storage, segregated corridors, and vertical transportation. Hazardous materials arrive at a secure loading dock and are moved directly to a specialized storage facility featuring a series of rooms segregated by the type of materials they contain. From the storage facility, materials will move through a series of chemical dumbwaiters and segregated corridors allowing them to reach gas cabinets in the laboratories without entering public corridors.

Materials in Duffield Hall are monitored by a toxic/flammable gas monitoring system. Stand-alone satellites monitor sensors in storage areas or gas cabinets. In the event of a leak, the satellites can respond by automatically shutting off valves or equipment, accelerating exhaust, and/or sounding alarms. Each satellite is linked in turn with the network monitoring all the devices. At this level, the system can take higher-level actions such as paging a technician, alerting the facility director or the campus hazardous materials response team. Each satellite is able to do its job regardless of the state of the rest of the system.

The gas monitoring system in Duffield Hall is manufactured by ATMI of Danbury, Conn.

New, Stricter Building Codes

In March 2002, New York State's Uniform Fire Protection and Building Code was supplanted by a new code based on the International Building Code (IBC). The new code is stricter in its approach to hazardous materials in buildings like Duffield Hall.

"The old code left it to the owner and design team to decide how to accommodate chemicals used in the facility," says Stundtner. "The IBC defines this kind of building and has tables of allowed quantities for materials that pose fire or health risks based on occupancy."

The threshold between the IBC's business or B occupancy rating and hazardous or H occupancy is low and easily triggered, even in an academic research facility. Allowable quantities are smaller as you go above or below the ground floor. At B occupancies the allowed quantities are very strict. H is very generous.

"Because we filed our building permit under the old code, the Ithaca City Building Department will allow us to use the quantities listed in our EIS, even though many exceed the new code," says Stundtner. "However, the city will apply the new code if we add chemicals or exceed any of the quantities in the EIS. That could be very expensive."

Cornell decided to redesign a portion of the third floor, upgrading it to H occupancy to allow greater long-term flexibility. This required approximately $250,000 in additional design and construction costs.

"It was cheaper to make the investment while we were in the planning stage than to go back and undo something later on," says Stundtner.

The other important change in the new code was the addition of seismic requirements. Stundtner notes that this probably wouldn't have impacted the structure much, but would have required special hangers for the sprinkler system.

"You may not have IBC where you are, but if your state is contemplating it, prepare your building for it and prepare to spend some money to accommodate it," says Stundtner.

By Lee Ingalls