Two buildings in Canada that demonstrate design principles geared toward improving collaboration are the Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science (CCIS) at the University of Alberta and the Academic Health Sciences Centre D Wing at the University of Saskatchewan. Both buildings will provide additional teaching space, expanded research capabilities, and a more modern, state-of-the-art environment.

Each building presents unique challenges and requires inventive solutions to address the concepts impacting how research buildings are designed. These concepts include interaction and collaboration, core facilities, building codes, and sustainability.

Building Particulars

The D Wing expansion at the University of Saskatchewan is a six-story building that will house laboratories, vivarium, and offices for the academic health sciences. The building will bring together biomedical researchers from the basic science departments in the College of Medicine and the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition. Programs in the D Wing will focus on research in the areas of cardiovascular, molecular design, neuroscience, drug discovery, cancer, and genomic medicine.

The L-shaped building is a major expansion of the existing Health Sciences Centre, which currently consists of the A Wing and the B Wing. The D Wing will surround the front of the B Wing on two sides, wrapping around the existing building and weaving together a single cohesive complex of buildings including the new addition, the A and B Wings, and a new E Wing on the other side of the complex. The Health Sciences Centre is separated from the main  campus by a major access road, and is connected to the Dental Clinic Building and the Royal University Hospital. Tunnel access will eventually connect this building with other main buildings on campus.

The new entry in the D Wing will serve as a primary route for faculty and students moving around campus and through the Health Sciences Centre. There are two atria that allow light to penetrate into the D Wing, providing an environment that encourages collaboration among occupants with gathering spaces and large expanses of glass and openness between floors.

“This is an opportunity for us to bring our people together in a professional way of teaching and for an interdisciplinary way of research,” says Jim Thornhill, associate dean of Research & Graduate Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. “We have more life sciences colleges than any other institution in Canada and it is important to our researchers that we start doing things differently.”

The 190,000-sf D Wing will house 90 principal investigators and 170 undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctorate students. The project began in 2002 and is slated for completion in 2011, with a projected construction cost of $78.9 million USD.

The goals of the new wing are to efficiently utilize space without duplicating support services, provide flexible laboratories that can easily be modified to support changing research, offer a high-quality work environment with ample natural light, provide common support spaces for interaction among faculty and graduate student offices adjacent to laboratories, and to address health, safety, and regulatory issues.

The nine-story CCIS at the University of Alberta includes nearly 600,000 sf of space for the Department of Physics, faculty offices, centrally scheduled lecture theatres and classrooms, and laboratories assigned for interdisciplinary science. Departments represented in the newly formed research groups include earth and atmospheric science, mathematics, physics, biological sciences, and chemistry.

The CCIS, located in the University’s historic quadrangle, will serve as the functional and symbolic crossroads for faculty and students traversing the campus. The building will provide state-of-the-art instructional facilities, accommodate increased enrollment among the science departments, create interdisciplinary science space that promotes collaboration, and offer a collegial environment to aid in the recruitment and retention of faculty.

Slated for completion in 2010 at a construction cost of $192 million (USD), the CCIS will house 1,094 researchers and post doctorate and graduate students with instructional seating for 3,000 students. The building will anchor the redevelopment of the historic quad and will be connected to the Chemistry Centre, the Biological Science Building, and the Earth Sciences Building.

Interaction and Collaboration

The CCIS and the Academic Health Sciences Centre D Wing are designed to provide optimum interaction and collaboration. A study conducted by Flad Architects to analyze the sociology of collaborative research space shows there is a positive relationship between interaction and scientific productivity. The study defines public space, transparency, and proximity as the three variables that impact interaction. As part of the study, Flad gathered data from 51 North American research and academic facilities.

“Flad’s experience assessing buildings was invaluable to me in determining what interaction would mean for our researchers and our students,” says Thornhill. “It is important to get buy-in from all of the users in the planning stage. The amount of interactive space included in buildings has escalated substantially in recent years and I needed evidence this was going to work at our University.”

Public space, transparency, and proximity—the three variables with the most profound impact on interaction and collaboration—are conducive to recruiting top scientists and obtaining additional research grants. Public space is a measurement of shared areas where impromptu or planned activities can occur; transparency refers to the characteristics of a building that foster face-to-face interaction; and proximity is the distance between researchers, laboratory resources, and students.

Incorporating public space into a facility could be as easy as putting casual seating in an area near a main circulation corridor that also allows some privacy. Both buildings will feature a public area where researchers and students can get food, a criteria that ranked high on Flad’s study of important interaction areas. Public spaces can also include atria, hallways, corridors, open stairs, conference rooms, lecture halls, lounges, coffee shops, and breakout areas.

The CCIS on the Alberta campus is connected to the main research building, which is divided into four different facilities. An atrium between each of the buildings is important to provide a way for people to see from floor to floor and across halls. Having such transparency represents a cultural shift from decades ago when research labs resembled bunkers with very little light and few windows for anyone to see in or out.

“Thoughts about the laboratory environment have changed and we put a lot of glass in buildings now,” says Mark Corey, a principal at Flad. “It is now very important for people to see from a laboratory into the corridor, across the atrium into the graduate student offices on the other side, and to be able to see through the building because it gives the appearance of a much bigger space with more daylight.”

Design elements that foster transparency and subsequent interaction include the use of open doors and walls, open sight lines between or across floors, and open lab spaces. An effective way to tear down the inherent vertical barriers of a multi-story building is to provide openings for sight lines into the floor levels below or above with atria and open staircases.

A key to increasing productivity is being aware of the distance between graduate students, post doctorates, principal investigators, and laboratories. There are no writing spaces and no room for graduate students in the laboratories at the CCIS or the D Wing. Instead, the offices are located next to the laboratories.

Interaction Index

Flad can calculate a facility’s collaborative value, or Interaction Index, based on adding together the three variables of public space, transparency, and proximity. The Salk Institute in San Diego is viewed as an ideal model of openness with a significant amount of interactive space. Flad’s statistics show the average Interaction Index in research buildings back in the 1960s was less than 10 and the average is now about 17. The Salk Institute was at 20 in 1960, while the CCIS and D Wing are both expected to be at approximately 20.

The Interaction Index formula applied to the CCIS shows that the investment in the facility’s atrium, transparency, and amount of public space resulted in an increase of $10 per sf or about three percent of the project’s total cost. Without this investment, CCIS would have an Interaction Index similar to buildings of the 1970s and 1980s.

“We are coming from a very traditional silo approach of conducting research in our life sciences, so it was important for us to know how the amount of interaction space would impact our researchers,” says Thornhill. “The real winner of this type of design will be our graduate students in the future.”

Information provided by Flad shows that having ample interaction space can increase the retention of researchers and improve the quality of the research. If that interaction results in the receipt of at least one additional grant per year, then the space will bring a return on capital investment and enhance the efficiency of researchers by at least one percent.

“Based upon the study, these two buildings are as interactive as the Salk Institute. Flad is at the leading edge of this trend of providing more space to foster interaction and collaboration,” says Corey. “Science buildings of the past used to be oriented toward a single scientific discipline. Everyone had their own individualized space and in order for researchers to interact they had to go to each other’s labs or go find people. Now, we’re including as much open space and transparency as we can and we’re putting people close to each other.”

Core Facilities

The location and type of core facilities included in the CCIS and the D Wing are also important considerations that impact cost.

“There used to be less attention paid to the location of core facilities because they were individualized and spread out through facilities, but that is not very economical,” says Corey. “It’s more cost-effective to share core facilities and to staff them collectively. For example, instead of having five small imaging facilities, it is more efficient to have one larger, centralized space.”

The D Wing uses core facilities for the vivarium, tissue culture, mass spectometry, behavioral testing, imaging, and telemetry. Meanwhile, the CCIS core facilities include ice core lab, imaging, micro array, fluid dynamics, water sampling, observatory, growth chambers, instructional facilities, and NMR.

The core facilities are specific to the type of research that occurs in a particular area of a building. Criteria for each core facility are usually different with some requiring vibration isolation, sound isolation, high containment, high security, or extreme ventilation. The location of core facilities should be addressed during the planning stages of a project because the type of facility and its requirements will impact the project cost and the layout of the building. For instance, animal housing is located in the basement of the D Wing, but the air handling units are on the roof. Rather than build ductwork from the roof to the basement, a mechanical room is being built adjacent to the vivarium.

The behavioral core space in the D Wing encompasses 20 percent of the building and required special planning to ensure the neuroscientists could be near the animals. The behavioral suite, which is part of the vivarium, has a combination of shared space and generic rooms. The rooms are dedicated to the research type rather than being dedicated to a researcher.

The CCIS researchers also have specific requirements for equipment that must be included in the building. The ice core lab, used by researchers who study Arctic ice cores that are millions of years old, requires a HEPA-filtered freezer room and special infrastructure, making location important.

Code Impacts and Sustainability

When designing multidisciplinary, multi-functional, multi-user buildings, it is necessary to understand jurisdictional codes and regulations that could impact the architecture, layout, fire grading, structure, and transparency. Identify the building classification as determined by relevant code officials prior to starting construction. The inclusion of atria separation, interconnected floors, vestibules at stairs, and smoke evacuation may be impacted by the codes. Both Universities are concerned about complying with codes.

Including sustainable design concepts helps ensure long-term viability of the new buildings.

“The operational costs of these buildings will far exceed the cost of construction and the cost of the staff,” notes Corey. “There are fundamental, small changes that can be made to enhance sustainability.”

Basic sustainability measures at both facilities include keeping offices separate from the laboratories, providing ample daylighting with automatic lighting controls, using a heat recovery system, and building enough flexibility into the laboratories by using a modular design to accommodate future changes. The D Wing requires some additional considerations, such as having operable windows in the offices, providing sufficient interstitial space, and designing a unique HVAC system for the vivarium.

“It is important to remember that sustainability is no longer an option; it’s a requirement,” says Thornhill.

By Tracy Carbasho