The Science Complex, which opened in August 2002, includes a new 90,000-sf, multi-disciplinary Science Building, a 2,400-sf greenhouse, and nearly 50,000 sf of renovated space in two existing buildings. The new Science Building houses chemistry, neuroscience, biochemistry/molecular biology, environmental studies, and health and exercise science. The total project cost $26.6 million, including $18.8 million for the Science Building, $1 million for the greenhouse, and $2.5 million for equipment.

The external design and internal features of the new building were rooted in Gettysburg's educational and cultural philosophy. Gettysburg is a small liberal arts college enrolling about 2,500 undergraduates, one-third of whom major in the sciences, including psychology. The College places a high priority on teaching: The average class size is 18 and 60 percent of classes have fewer than 15 students. At the same time, Gettysburg expects its faculty to engage in scientific research.

"We have 37 faculty in the sciences who are tenured," says Daniel DeNicola, college provost. "We're running seven NSF grants totaling millions of dollars. And, of course, students paying a fairly high tuition are expecting a lot of interaction with those faculty and the opportunity to do undergraduate research."

The Science Complex satisfies both interests.

Building for the Future

A primary goal of the new complex was to bring together the various scientific disciplines, which for years had been scattered around campus. Biology and psychology were in McCreary Hall; they remain there, but the building has been renovated and is now attached to the west side of the new Science Building. Physics and astronomy shared space with environmental studies in Masters Hall, an existing building that forms the northern side of the new Science Complex. Environmental studies started as a few courses in Masters Hall. As it grew from a minor to a major to a department, it began to crowd out physics and astronomy. Chemistry was across campus in its own building, which was nearing the end of the life of its second renovation. Biochemistry/molecular biology were split between the biology and chemistry facilities.

"The health and exercise science department has undergone the most change," DeNicola says. "Years ago, it was in the field house with athletics. Then it evolved to examine the scientific underpinnings of human performance, but it had no good lab space."

Neuroscience did not exist as a program at all before the new building was constructed. There were neuroscience courses, but no purpose-designed space. This year, it is being offered as a minor; within a year, the college will offer it as a major.

DeNicola wasn't looking for a short-term solution to these problems. He needed to make sure that he was designing a building that would serve the sciences and the College for many generations to come. Instead of tapping into the knowledge of his most experienced faculty, DeNicola did the opposite.

"We faced a classic dilemma: faculty will tend to try to design space that allows them to do better what they are now doing, not what they might be doing in the future," he says. "We knew that our younger faculty would spend the greatest amount of time in this facility, so I said at the beginning, 'The younger tenured faculty will have the greatest say about this building.'"

As a result, the building has some features that more traditional faculty might have shied away from. For example, older chemistry faculty had concerns about the safety of installing computers in wet labs, while younger faculty took it as a given that their computers would be at hand while they conducted research. Older faculty members also were not as comfortable sharing their research space with students. The younger faculty not only embraced the idea, they enhanced it by suggesting ways to open up the research space even further.

"This was a significant point," says DeNicola. "We did not want this to be a place where students do their work in isolation."

One of DeNicola's guiding principles, therefore, was to "build for the future" by designing flexibility into the construction.

Planning for flexibility in the foreseeable future means including extra office space for faculty that has not yet been hired, or providing a lab for a person who may not be hired for another three years. Planning for the unforeseeable future is more complicated, because it is impossible to predict how science and the College will evolve in the long term. To do that, the building requires "a rich infrastructure," meaning that it contains optimal technology in the form of electrical and data systems, lighting, and HVAC, even though all the labs don't require it now.

The building contains 75 miles of coaxial cable, 50 miles of optical fiber cable, and bandwidth for high-speed data transfer, yet it is also a wireless zone. There are touchscreen panels at the podiums in various classrooms, and a bar-coded inventory system controls the stockroom.

In environmental studies, some professors require a wet lab, while social scientists do more computer-based research in dry labs. Both labs contain the same ductwork, however, so the dry lab can be converted to a wet lab in the future. Using the same principle, the wet labs do not have built-in fume hoods; instead, they have snorkel fume hoods, which are made of S-shaped tubing suspended from the ceiling, and are easily removed.

All the labs, in fact, are essentially the same when they are empty, and the professors can customize them with casework and equipment.

"When you customize a lab, you can have the architect design custom casework," says DeNicola. "We rejected that. We will customize, but everything has to be able to be unbolted and moved someplace else, even the vibration reduction table in the laser lab."

Reflecting Teaching Methods

Another guiding principle was that the design of the building should reflect not only the technological needs of the College, but also its pedagogical philosophy. At Gettysburg, that means small classrooms for small classes and tutorials; collaborative learning and research facilities; and informal academic spaces outside the classrooms, laboratories, and offices.

One goal was to encourage synergies across disciplines. Bringing all the sciences together in one complex was the first step. In addition, both wings of the new building and McCreary Hall flow into a massive central common area surrounded by general-purpose shared spaces, such as reading rooms, seminar rooms, generic classrooms, a centralized stock room, even the kitchen. The shared facilities help capture efficiencies that might allow the College to gain some space and cost savings.

The most spectacular shared facility is the attached computer-controlled greenhouse, which has become a centerpiece of the new complex.

"The greenhouse was intended not to be a warehouse for plants, but a real teaching facility," says DeNicola. "It is actually a kind of botanical research and teaching center.

"Our faculty has embraced this, because they now are thinking jointly in ways they weren't before," he continues. "This is a big deal at Gettysburg where the departments have often had their own buildings."

The College also wanted the new building to reflect diverse teaching styles based on a philosophy of active learning. As a result, no two classrooms or departments in the new building are alike: they all have different sizes, different layouts, and different furniture.

The largest classroom, a traditional lecture hall, seats 55 people in a tiered, curved configuration of fixed seats. Another classroom has a flat floor with moveable tables and a seating capacity of 40.

As a department, environmental studies chose to create a lounge space with faculty offices clustered around it. Faculty in other departments wanted their offices dispersed and adjacent to labs.

Placing a Premium on Aesthetics

Behind every consideration of the building's function was an underlying concern for the aesthetics of the project. The College needed a large building to accommodate its needs, and the designers wanted the interior to feel open and spacious. But DeNicola did not want the new Science Building to overwhelm the historic campus with its sheer size.

To "shrink" the exterior, the architects curved the façade, which eliminated the appearance of a massive wall looming over campus. They also designed it with a lot of windows to open up the interior and to achieve the goal of having "science in sight."

The centerpiece of the interior is the commons, where an elliptical spiral staircase of maple, terrazzo, steel, and glass winds up to and past the upper floors. Above it is a conical glass skylight.

"This is a very important building for the campus," says DeNicola. "We need to have attractive, inviting, and livable spaces. We want a structure that looks beautiful when it is lit at night and helps enhance the ambiance of the campus. We want a distinctive and yet harmonious building for the campus."

Lessons Learned

DeNicola says the smartest thing he did was to appoint an honest broker to look after the day-to-day details of the project and to represent the interests of the faculty. It was important that the person be objective and not appear to favor one department over another.

DeNicola appointed Rhonda Good, who had been administering the College's virtual observatory, as the assistant provost for the sciences. Her position had such a positive effect on the project that she was retained full time even though she was intended to drop to part time during the commissioning of the building.

Think of the big picture when planning a major project, DeNicola advises. Consider not only whether it will serve the immediate purpose—is it a good science building?—but will it contribute to the overall mission of the institution?

DeNicola says: "We asked ourselves, 'Will it help us to continue to attract strong science students? Will it stop the drain of students out of the sciences? Does it do something for faculty development?'"

One way to make certain you are on the right track is to make major programmatic decisions up front because program dictates design, DeNicola advises. For example, DeNicola made the decision, which was unpopular with some older faculty, to have the main library absorb the science holdings and eliminate the need for a separate science library.

When the sciences were scattered throughout campus chemistry, psychology, and physics developed their own libraries. Meanwhile, the College operates a main library that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is located near the science complex. DeNicola says the sciences couldn't afford to have a full-service library, so it was better not to have one at all. Consolidating the libraries also allows for more interaction between the sciences and other disciplines.

"If you can't do it right, don't do it all," says DeNicola.

By Lisa Wesel

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