These are some of the findings of a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of the Center for Clinical Sciences Research (CCSR) at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, Calif.

Conducted in the summer of 2001 at the CCSR's one-year anniversary, the POE measured responses of faculty, staff, students, and the building services staff to open lab areas, shared lab support areas, and functional relationships (desk-to-bench, lab-to-lab-support, office-to-office-support, etc.), among a host of other topics. (See sidebar: Planning an Efficient Post-Occupancy Evaluation.)

The POE was composed of two sections: a Web-enabled occupant survey and in-person focus groups. Survey questions posed a statement and asked the respondent to gauge their agreement on a scale of one to five, with one indicating strong disagreement and five indicating strong agreement. Focus groups sessions helped to flesh out the survey results.

The CCSR

Completed in the spring of 2000, the CCSR houses researchers from the departments of pathology, radiation oncology, surgery, molecular pharmacology, immunology, genetics, oncology, anatomy, pediatrics, microbiology and immunology, gastroenterology, biochemistry, and dermatology. The four-story, 214,000-sf facility, designed by London-based Foster and Partners, is intended to facilitate interaction and collaboration among these different disciplines.

The research floors in the CCSR are divided into three areas: a lab zone, a support zone, and an office zone. The lab zone is open on each floor. The support zone is separated from the lab zone by a ghost corridor and provides shared space rather than being the province of a specific department. The office zone is separated from the lab and support areas by a rated corridor running the length of each wing.

Think Benches, Not Square Feet

In programming academic research space, Stanford emphasizes the number of lab benches per faculty member, not square feet.

"The only way to flexibly assign lab space on a bench-by-bench basis is to get the walls out of the labs," says David O'Brien, director of Medical School Institutional Planning for Stanford.

Open lab areas and shared support space are also intended to diminish concerns over turf.

"A lot of faculty compare themselves on square footage, which is really an apples-to-oranges comparison" says O'Brien. "Over time, we've persuaded faculty to look at the lab bench as the real measure of the size of their programs. So far that seems to have taken hold."

Open Lab Concept

Results from the POE show that the open lab concept definitely breaks down barriers to interaction and promotes equipment sharing.

"People can no longer say, 'This is my centrifuge, please keep your hands off,' because there isn't a door," says O'Brien.

Open lab design questions in the POE received an average score of approximately 3.3, which is positive. Fifty-five percent of respondents ranked the open labs either positive or strongly positive. Positive responses outweighed negative responses by roughly two to one.

"We take this as an indicator that the open lab and the way it was designed are working," he says.

The amount of open space also raised concerns among some occupants. There are only two doors separating lab suites on each lab wing. These were required for fire separation by the fire marshal and are on hold-opens the majority of the time.

"That is a long run of laboratories without any doors that are routinely closed, so people working late at night do feel less secure in the building," says O'Brien.

During the design phase, faculty wanted additional doors built into the lab zone. Instead the lab area was designed so that additional doors could be added later if needed. So far, O'Brien says, no additional doors have been requested.

Lab Support

The support zone provides shared modular space areas for equipment, instrumentation, tissue culture suites, hood rooms, and procedure rooms. Water, CO₂, and power are designed into the walls so support spaces can easily convert from one type to another. This hasn't happened yet, but O'Brien notes that they are only two years into a building the University will likely occupy for at least 25 years.

The shared support spaces in the CCSR scored even better than the open lab design, with an average score of 3.35 and a two-to-one ratio of positive to negative responses. In particular, the location of the lab support area was judged to be very convenient. Most occupants agreed that the shared rooms promote collaboration.

"There is still some fine-tuning for us to do within the support zone, but the overall concept seems to be working."

However, the support zone was judged to be inadequate for some aspects of modern research such as computing and animal procedures. The amount of light-controlled spaces available for microscopy was also deemed not adequate, as was the amount of general storage space.

"The world moves much faster than our facilities projects," says O'Brien. "When you have a project that takes ten years that is not surprising."

O'Brien adds that there is also some ambiguity about ownership inherent in an open space as large as the CCSR's 14,000-sf lab wings. For building occupants this can raise what O'Brien refers to as a "moral hazard," the fear that a member of an adjoining research group will take unfair advantage of the community's space.

"We have refrigerators and freezers parked in the ghost corridor and the evaluation registered some degree of unease among the faculty. But so far there hasn't been a peep about security and no equipment has been lost."

Offices Suites

Each office suite in the CCSR's office zones contains three faculty offices, with an anteroom that acts as a support zone. The offices in the CCSR have operable windows, or more specifically a panel in the window array that can be slid open approximately 12 inches. One surprising result from the POE was occupants' overwhelmingly positive response to the windows.

"We got more bang for the buck out of those operable windows than we could possibly have imagined," says O'Brien. "When we did the counts on where the energy was going in the building, the cost of providing that natural air was negligible, especially considering the goodwill we've received in return."

Overall, the office suites scored well on promoting interaction, although they were seen to be "tight," particularly in the anteroom support areas, with inadequate space for research workstations and file space. Despite a clerestory window above the faculty offices, most administrative respondents felt there was not enough natural light in the office support areas.

Office related questions in the survey scored an average of 3.0, with the ratio of positive-to-negative responses almost two to one.

While the majority of the functional relationships in the CCSR (desk-to-bench, lab-to-lab-support, office-to-office-support) scored favorably in the POE, the bench-to-faculty-office relationship was viewed less positively. The problem singled out was the corridor separating the offices from the labs, which was viewed as a barrier rather than a facilitator of interaction.

"What you separate, you have to find ways of bringing back together. Administrative assistants, for instance, are very much a part of the program and you need to respect them," says O'Brien.

Why Generic Programming?

Planning for the CCSR was generic in terms of the program and the design, which O'Brien says is essential to successfully planning these kinds of buildings in academia.

"Time is not an ally in developing specialized facilities for academic medicine," says O'Brien. "You have to anticipate multiple occupants over the life of the building and the actual initial occupants are usually unknown at the time you begin."

The key generic program metrics of the CCSR project include:
• Net assigned sf per floor
• Net assigned sf per lab bench
• Lab benches per faculty member
• Ratio of lab space to lab support space

Planners arrived at these numbers for the CCSR based on three previous buildings on the Medical School campus: the Fairchild Science Building, a basic science building built in 1975; the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine, built in 1989; and the Medical School Laboratory Surge Building, which houses primarily clinical sciences, built in 1989. All three share a common floor plate, and like the CCSR, house multiple departments that share space.

"Over the last 25 years, these ratios, although varying somewhat, haven't shown a big swing from one building to the next," says O'Brien.

Drive Design to Metrics

O'Brien advises setting these programming metrics early and driving the design to them. Important metrics must be kept in front of everyone involved in the project, then continually measured as the design and the program changes.

"Each of these is a moving target," says O'Brien. "You need to monitor and project the metric, adjusting the numerator and/or the denominator as needed. If one of them moves, something is going to give on the other."

For example, after construction began planners noted that the number of benches available on one floor was below the target, given the number of faculty members. To remedy this, some space originally designated for support was converted to bench space in order to bring up the number of benches per faculty member.

"We found that it was relatively cheap to put benches along equipment walls which upped the bench count from 164 to 180 for the second floor, or around 6.9 benches per faculty member," says O'Brien. Unfortunately, this also reduced the amount of equipment and storage space per bench on the floor—an element of the building's design receiving relatively lower scores in the POE.

By Lee Ingalls

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