"There are several good reasons why we chose to 'build green,'" says David Greunke, Pharmacia's senior manager of strategic facilities planning. "Obviously, we wanted to lower operating costs and reduce the environmental impact, but it was also important to improve the physical well-being, creativity, and safety of the building's occupants in every way possible. Our researchers love to work in this building, and the green elements have a lot to do with that."

The company's commitment to sustainable building principles led to their inclusion as a project goal equal to schedule and cost, as well as being part of the project mission statement. Other goals were increased researcher interaction, lab flexibility, and worker safety.

"Safety was factored into every design decision we made," says Greunke. "And, although Q was designed mainly as a chemistry building, the research modules had to be flexible enough to handle a variety of lab types. Interaction was also a very important goal. We needed to change from our old paradigm of two researchers working in an enclosed lab."

Early Research and Modeling

An early step in Building Q planning was a pre-design charette that gathered everyone involved in the project--researchers, senior executives, architects, and the project manager. Bill Browning of the Rocky Mountain Institute helped direct the charette.

"We locked everyone in a room for eight hours and brainstormed ideas around green buildings and lab designs," says Steven Schultz, Pharmacia's sustainability manager. "In the end, we captured 90 ideas and were able to integrate 80 of those into the building."

Both Greunke and Schultz attribute Building Q's innovation to extensive research and modeling during the planning phase. Pharmacia researchers toured more than 20 high-tech lab facilities across the country, including the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and the Genentech and Chiron buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"We learned a lot on those field trips," says Greunke. "They were invaluable. We saw quite a few innovative features that were incorporated in Building Q, like daylighting and atrium spaces."

In addition to the planning charette and walk-through tours, the design team used specialized light and HVAC modeling software to test 80 different lighting and airflow scenarios in 10 different categories. The Weidt Group, of Minnetonka, Minn., was commissioned to generate the comprehensive models. The data were used to build a full-scale mock-up of a five-station lab unit, which allowed researchers to provide feedback before the team finalized its design.

Bringing the Outdoors In

One of the primary drivers behind Building Q's green principles is Pharmacia's desire to maximize the creativity and well-being of its occupants.

"We believe that enhancement of creativity could be the single most valuable aspect of an R&D facility," says Schultz. "Anything that can be done to magnify researcher creativity is important to us. We've found that natural daylighting and fresh air are integral to a person's sense of well-being and can enhance productivity."

Out of this philosophy arose one of Q's most prominent design features: full natural daylighting. A pair of atria provides daylight to the building core, while a roof-mounted radial lens harvests light and directs it downward, distributing it evenly around the building. The labs, located in the center of Q's floor plan, receive daylight views from the atria.

Offices, which are situated around the perimeter, feature light shelves with perforated blinds that occupants can open and close. Daylight also comes in above the light shelf, bounces off a sloped high reflectant ceiling, and penetrates into the rest of the corridor.

"Our Lightscape model showed that most days we would not need any supplemental illumination withthis configuration, although we did install lights above the shelf that take the same path as the daylight if needed," say Schultz.

Both the atria skylights and the windows on the perimeter of the building use spectrally selective glass, which allows large amounts of visible light to penetrate while filtering out infrared light. The design team collaborated with 3M, the building architects, and the skylight manufacturer to customize a radial lens configuration specifically for use in Building Q.

"Q has ample amounts of high-quality natural light," says Schultz. "On a day with an 8,000-foot-candle sun, the radial lens system delivers 1,000-foot-candles worth of light to the atrium floor. With a conventional system, the foot-candle delivery would be less than 70."

Atria and Open Labs Promote Interaction

In addition to providing natural light, Q's atria are engineered to increase researcher interaction. To encourage casual gathering, the larger south atrium is designed to resemble a city park, complete with tables, a tree, and a fountain. The design team even used light-modeling software to determine which plants would grow best in each area.

The goal of increased interaction also inspired an open floor plan with no hard walls between labs and offices. There are no private offices, and 80 percent of the lab units are open from the office to the lab modules. Color-coded "neighborhoods" consisting of four lab units each support 20 researchers. To mitigate privacy concerns, each neighborhood contains two enclosed 10' x 12' rooms where researchers can make private calls or hold meetings.

Single-Pass Air

The key to creating a safe open-air design is Q's 100 percent once-through ventilation system, in which air is supplied to the office zones on the perimeter and exhausted through the lab fume hoods in the building core.

"Our open-air design, which is the result of considerable modeling and environmental safety analysis, does a couple of things," says Schultz. "One, it sets up a very strong air migration pattern from the offices to the lab so odors are contained within the labs; and two, it gives office occupants the benefit of breathing 100-percent fresh, outside air."

Q is also outfitted entirely with passive infrared sensors that control lighting and the face velocity of lab fume hoods. Daylight sensors throughout the building control supplemental lighting on cloudy days and at night. The sensors will ramp up from 10 to 100 percent as needed and are sensitive enough to respond to changes as subtle as a passing cloud.

When the lab is occupied the hood face velocity is about 100 cubic feet per minute (fpm). When the lab is unoccupied for a period of 90 minutes, this drops to 75 fpm.

"Lab technicians can walk into their labs day or night and the lights will come on immediately. The face velocity will ramp up in less than 60 seconds, the temperature will stabilize, and all this happens without touching a single light switch or making a phone call to facilities. When they are done with their experiments, they can walk out of the building and the lab will go back to sleep," explains Schultz.

Keeping It Green

Material selection for Building Q was a significant part of the research process. Whenever possible, project planners used only materials that were available within a 300-mile radius in order to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Carpeting and ceiling tiles made of mostly recycled materials were installed, and certified woods were used wherever possible. The wallboard is a synthetic gypsum product made from the flue gas waste of power plants.

Before Building Q could be completed, an existing structure on the site had to be demolished. Pharmacia managed to recycle or re-use 78 percent of the prior building's mass. The steel beams and all metal were sold, and most of the other materials were ground up and used for fill, generating a project cost saving of $55,000.

While planners ensured that exclusively non-toxic materials were used in construction, they also wanted to avoid the potential for contamination from routine cleaning with ammonia and alcohol. On the advice of a cleaning consultant, Pharmacia implemented a green housekeeping program developed by Rochester Midland that uses biodegradable and non-toxic alternatives to traditionally toxic cleaning agents.

Amid concerns about the functionality of the alternative products, Pharmacia conducted a nine-month pilot test of the system in another building. The pilot was so successful that the system has since been rolled out to all Pharmacia sites in the Chicago area.

Holistic Approach to Environmentally Friendly Labs

Building Q was selected as a U.S. Green Building Program pilot project and has earned the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold designation.

Although the overall benefits can be considerable, executing a green project of this scale involves a significant learning curve, and, according to both Schultz and Greunke, the best thing a company can do to ensure maximum success is get an early start and conduct extensive research.

"Light and airflow modeling are crucial to a project like this," says Schultz. "It's really smart to front-load the project. If you do more work in the initial design phase and spend time up front, you'll end up with a green design that is cost effective. Using LEED standards and a little research, a company can get a bronze or better rating at no additional cost, and a silver rating can be done with only a three to five percent increase."

Another key, according to Schultz, is looking at the big picture.

"A whole-building approach was used to justify several systems that proved highly successful," he says. "For example, when we stepped back and looked at the whole project, we realized that if we installed a building-wide heat recovery system, we could downsize the heating coils, the piping, the pumps, and the chilled water system, and downsize a new boiler which was to be installed in the future. When we included all these items in our calculations, we were able to justify the cost.

"The system works so well," Schultz continues, "that on a day with 34-degree outside air we can run on the heat recovery system alone. In the end, all the energy conservation strategies included in the building will save us more than $930,000 annually in energy costs."

Third-party commissioning is critical with a technically complex project such as Building Q. E Cube, an experienced commissioning company familiar with green building, helped commission Building Q for Pharmacia.

Schultz also recommends that a single person champion green projects to ensure that they actually remain green through construction.

"You really need to have an owner and architects that are committed to green principles because for every idea you come up with, someone else will have a number of reasons not to do it. You have to find reasons to make it happen. Labs like this are usually energy hogs so they present great opportunities for savings. Simply implementing basic green strategies can result in as much as a 40 percent reduction in energy usage," Schultz concludes.

By Johnathon Allen

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ISSN: 1096-4894