“It was to provide space we thought we would need for the faculty we thought we would hire,” says Lee Gavel, SFU’s chief facility officer and university architect. “We didn’t yet have a funding mechanism in place to provide that space.”

In some ways, that’s an ideal assignment: To design a new facility from the ground up, based on the needs of the entire institution, without the input of researchers lobbying for spaces to fill their unique needs. The final scope was determined by the funding the researchers eventually received.

“The idea was to build an empty building, and as the faculty got funding, they’d come with their equipment and fit it out,” says Gavel. “If the users become real very early in the design process, they want the space to be very specific for their needs, rather than generic and designed for the university at large.”

In reality, as soon as word got out, the faculty started lining up to get into the new building, so Gavel was not spared all of the lobbying. But he was empowered to tell the researchers that he could not custom-build it for them, because the design had to be flexible enough to accommodate whoever may work there in the future. The University was responsible for the systems in the building, but the researchers would have to pay for any customization they required.

“We were able to hold true to our fundamental principles,” he says.

The University did know that the building needed to include spaces for kinesiology, biochemistry, health, earth science, microscopes, lasers, spectrometers, and computing network services. It also needed to provide undergraduate classrooms, space for fisheries research, audio recording studios, faculty offices, and administration.

“That’s a pretty challenging set of uses when you look at what that means in terms of vibration, sound, acoustics, and mechanical systems for air handling,” says Gavel.

In addition to the generic desire for those kinds of facilities, the University also had two very specific and costly needs that had to be met within the building: An animal research facility to replace an existing one on campus, and a nanotechnology and materials science laboratory, which requires vibration-free spaces and cleanrooms, for a group of eminent faculty researchers who had won a prestigious grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

Ironically, the CFI grant was partly responsible for how generic the planners could be in designing the rest of the building. Canadian university buildings typically are funded 100 percent by the provincial government, explains Gavel, and government agencies require a lot of specificity up front. In this case, 40 percent came from the federal government, another 40 percent from the province, and 20 percent from the University, which freed SFU from having to outline in advance how every space would be occupied.

Build the Team First

Building a generic facility offers some freedom in the design, but it also creates challenges.

“So, how do you begin to make the decisions that you know you are going to have to make as you go forward?” asks Gavel. “The first thing you have to put in place is a management structure.”

The strength of that structure depends on committees of people at different decision-making levels. The building committee at the top of the chain must include vice presidents and deans who have the authority to arbitrate competing claims and set limits on the building. One faculty member wanted to do research using pigs, for example, but the vivarium was going to be designed to accommodate only small animals.

“That vice presidential level is necessary to be able to enforce things like that,” explains Gavel. “You have to put an administrative structure in place at that highest level of policy, budget, and schedule.”

The user committee of faculty representatives, chaired by a dean or associate dean, is charged with parsing out the space to the various disciplines. The special use sub-committee includes the lab managers who are well-versed in the requirements of the highly specialized equipment that some of the labs will contain, in this case the viviarium and the cleanrooms. The design and construction team is present for all levels of discussion, as is a person specifically appointed to represent the faculty.

“I can’t emphasize enough the importance of the faculty representative’s role,” says Gavel. “There is a position of trust there that they feel they need to have. If you don’t have that, you are constantly seen to be the other side of the table, and there is an attitude in the discussions that is difficult to get past.”

Designing for Flexibility

SFU has developed a modular building design that flexibly accommodates the variety of uses in a multi-disciplinary science building—laboratories, classrooms, studios, and offices. One wing that is divided in the middle by a corridor with lab-width spaces on either side, for example, can just as easily accommodate two corridors lined with offices. Similarly, the lab modules can be doubled up to become classroom modules. SFU also created in this building a separate office wing to solve the problem of creating over-height, over-serviced, and over-priced offices within the labs.

“Faculty members always, and with complete justification, want to have their office beside their lab,” says Gavel. “But that is very, very expensive office space.”

One of the biggest challenges in treating the faculty as tenants who have to fund the fit-out of their own labs was delineating where the University’s “property” ends and the faculty’s begins.

“We have divided this building between the served and the owned space,” explains Gavel. “This is where plug and play starts to come into it.”

SFU is responsible for the walls; the exterior of the building, which contains mechanical service ducts; the middle of the building, where services also are distributed; and the ceiling and floor space. Drainage runs through the shafts, which are also University-owned. Electrical and communications rooms are stacked for efficiency, and shared-use elevators allow economy while meeting service needs.

Services are available for diverse uses, but they are not distributed where they are not required, and they are capped and valved for easy access.

“We provide the ability for the faculty to hook up, but we don’t provide the hooking up,” he said. “We had to try and find that magic level of what the house is providing versus what we expect the faculty to be able to bring in to it, without making it cost-prohibitive.”

Sharing the Risk

It wasn’t just the building that was designed to be flexible; the construction process needed to be, as well. Rather than going with straight construction management, SFU opted for a construction management at risk strategy, which accelerated the schedule and reduced costs.

SFU divided the project into a series of four packages—services and site work, structure, envelope, and final fit-out—and progressively entered into a fixed-sum general contract for each piece. Through this series of packages, SFU designed, tendered, and committed to each piece of work, then transferred the risk as a stipulated sum contract added to the previous work. It then proceeded to the next piece.

“Pure construction management is an agent acting as a consultant to the owner, and there is no incentive to take risk or to drive the project,” says Gavel. “With construction management at risk, the construction manager takes on the role of general contractor at several points throughout the project, and accepts risk at those points. For each stage, you have the flexibility of knowing what you did before to guide what comes next.”

This kept the contractors at the table to help with decisions along the way, so design changes were agreed upon mutually.

“Fixed price takes an extra year because the entire building is designed before you go out to bid,” says Gavel. “This method wins on many different fronts.”

But it isn’t easy managing four contracts instead of one, says Gavel, who created another level of project management to assist his staff in dealing with the complexities of the process.

Lessons Learned

Despite the input from a good planning team, it is impossible to identify all functional requirements and equipment needs up front. Therefore, it is important to over-design the central systems for future capacity. Make sure that the air volume, the power supply, and the amount of gas is sufficient for almost any level of demand.

When planning the spaces, watch for the “proprietary trap,” warns Gavel. Keep specifications generic, keep the consultants free from conflict, watch for compatibility with existing systems, and determine the maintenance contract implications.

“We discovered pretty quickly that you need to put the specialized spaces on the ground,” he says. “You need to separate the office component from the labs, and you need to keep the general circulation away from the labs. In other words, it is not only those pipes and wires that you are separating, it is the way people move through the building.”

By Lisa Wesel