Designing, building, and occupancy planning for the new multi-tenant research facility have been a consuming mission for Hugh Brock, Ph.D., co-director of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of British Columbia, for the past three years. The pressure-packed schedule has given Brock the opportunity to experience the gamut of consequences of bypassing the traditional planning process in favor of fast-track design.

The project's guiding philosophy has been to provide versatile space so users themselves can decide what they want upon occupancy. Most outcomes of this approach range from positive to superior. The building's statistics certainly belong in the latter category. Housing three main tenants, the center is home to the 250-student capacity medical school, along with the Life Sciences Institute, the research arm that brings together four faculties and 10 departments in roughly 100 PI laboratories. The third occupant is the Centre for Disease Modeling (CDM), which is devoted to animal studies, along with proteomics and genomics. At about 70,000 sf, it is one of the largest animal facilities anywhere, with roughly 5,000 sf of BSL-3 lab, 7,000 sf of BSL-2 lab, and 35,000 holding cages.

The cost metrics are even more impressive. The research floors and medical education were built at the cost of $207 (Canadian) per sf, which Brock describes as "astonishingly lower than most comparable costs in Canada and North America." The animal care facility is running about $550 (Canadian) per sf, and BSL-3 is $950 (Canadian) per sf. Although final numbers haven't been calculated yet, Brock expects the total costs for the building and equipment to come in under $200 million (Canadian).

While planning time was sparse for many aspects of the building, the compressed timeline yielded several surprising benefits, including fostering a strong sense of partnership among the project team.

"The hole in the ground appeared in July 2002," explains Brock. "Given the project size, the rapid pace meant that decisions made on paper one week showed up in concrete the next week. The tight schedule forced us into an efficient, economical, and 'no-looking-back' decision-making team and encouraged a lot of cooperation between the consultants and the architects, the building folks, and the users. That was, from my point of view, a spectacular success. We worked together really well in a high-energy environment."

Space Planning

The eight-story Life Science Centre consists of the street level entry topped by four floors of research labs and three below-grade levels: a walk-on mechanical floor and two stories dedicated to the CDM and other building functions.

Designed with two primary entrances and a central main street, the ground floor is occupied primarily by medical education, with two 350-seat lecture theaters and the histology lab on one side of the building and administrative offices tucked around perimeters. Medical school facilities extend into the basement, with the gross anatomy lab and the morgue on level B2. Level B2 also houses the BSL-3 facility embedded in an animal care area, shipping/receiving functions, and mechanical workshops. Level B3 accommodates imaging and the NMR facilities for the building, along with additional animal care, the transgenic facility, and the BSL-2 space.

On the research floors, three parallel wings are separated by two enclosed, five-story atria. The wings follow a repeating pattern with a central circulation corridor flanked on each side by a zone of common equipment rooms and then long blocks of lab space lined with perimeter windows so researchers can look out into the light-filled atria.

"Space planning on the whole worked rather well," observes Brock. "There are great facilities for talking, reading journals, drinking coffee, or having lunch. One decision we made was that no one would have the right to space; if it wasn't being used, it would be reallocated."

Lab Flexibility

To rein in some of the complexity resulting from the building's mixed-use mission, labs are based on a generic, one-size-fits-all approach rather than customized for individual occupants. Researchers can add features like a new door or an extra sink or merge two rooms, but the costs have to come from their own funding sources.

"This has simplified our life," comments Brock.

An emphasis on flexibility features not only helps users outfit labs according to their individual needs; it also minimized decisions required from the planning team. For example, benches that adjust in height from 36 inches down to 30 inches provide the space for writing, computer, imaging, or wet bench activities, depending on how they are configured. Users can make their own choices and change them over time, one of several lab attributes that has been drawing "rave reviews," according to Brock.

Under-bench cabinetry on rolling pedestals allows researchers to organize the space either for knee holes, storage, freezers, or other pieces of equipment.

"Users have voted resoundingly for more furniture, taking pieces from their old labs," Brock reports.

Pressure from the accelerated schedule also allowed the project team to skirt the question of what kind of casework to install in the common equipment rooms.

"We simply didn't have time to do the planning," Brock admits. "Anticipating frequent user change requests, we decided to provide four-foot, six-foot, and eight-foot tables from a store of them in the basement. The reduced millwork helped enormously in cutting costs and planning time, and the users like it."

Minimal Core, Maximum MEP

Early on, UBC made the decision to minimize the number of core facilities in the Life Science Centre. The sticking point, as Brock sees it, is that the rapid pace of scientific change can render certain methods or equipment obsolete far too quickly.

As a result, the building's centralized services are limited to standard activities like imaging (including MRI, ordinary electron microscopes, and confocal microscopes), cell sorting, a transgenic mouse facility, proteomics, and specialized physiology. All building occupants have access to these functions on a revenue-neutral, fee-for-service basis. Other than that, users have to find their own space for the facilities they need.

"The trick, of course, is to figure out what people want and concentrate on those areas offering economies of scale," Brock remarks. "If 50 people in the building want a particular feature, then you go for it because the strong demand will push user costs down.

"Many institutions have low-demand services like monoclonal antibody facilities or vector construction and cloning facilities," he continues, "but our collection of people didn't vote for these things with their grants. The real question is 'what are you willing to pay for?'"

On the other hand, the building's mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and ventilation systems received almost-obsessive attention. The building is equipped with more circuits and network capacity than any reasonable user would need, with nearly 40 percent of the receptacles on emergency power, Brock remarks.

"It is worth it," he says. "The value engineering folks kept asking us why we were doing this, but for long-term flexibility it was money well spent."

The Centre has also been designed to qualify for LEED­ certification, currently in process. Although a Gold rating is "hard to attain in a building that has so many air changes," Brock remarks, the efficiencies implemented are expected to cut annual operating costs by about $1 million.

Bench and Office Space

While a generic lab approach simplified design issues, LSC still needed to determine the most economical ratio of bench to common equipment space. Examining an array of alternatives, from the one unit of bench to one-quarter unit of equipment elsewhere on campus ("way too low," Brock comments) to the one-to-one ratio he encountered while working at a major private university in the U.S. ("exceedingly wasteful of equipment space"), the project team ultimately settled on a formula dividing the typical 1,000-sf lab into 600 sf of bench and 400 sf of equipment room.

"This ratio of one-third to two-thirds seems to be keeping people pretty happy," Brock muses.

A slight disconnect surfaced, however, between what users said they wanted in office arrangements and what they prefer now that they're in the building. Single rows of 140-sf offices stretch out along connecting corridors on the north and south sides of the three lab wings. Each 1,000-sf lab unit receives an allocation of two offices (a total of 280 sf), one for the PI and the other serving either two post-docs or four students. The latter group has displayed a distinct preference for working at write-up desks provided for them in the lab areas.

Originally, Brock says, students and post-docs pushed hard for office space, only to find it is much more convenient to stay in the lab instead of walking back to offices they describe as "too far away."

More Simplicity

Another streamlining measure is the introduction of shared administrative services for all tenants, a distinct departure from the university's standard operating procedure, in which each department is responsible for its own administration. The Life Science Centre consolidates these functions in a central zone of offices on the first floor.

"Because of the complexity, we shifted to more of a tenant-commercial model of property management than the standard academic building," Brock explains.

While faculties were initially reluctant to give up control, users now like the idea because they don't have to deal with operational matters. Reducing unnecessary duplication and redundancy through the whole building is saving UBC a lot of time and money. It also allows consistency and alignment with the university's overall plan.

The decision to co-locate researchers by group, rather than by department or faculty, was a similar time-saving move. When users themselves were asked to select their own neighbors, the idea met with enthusiastic response.

"The unintended consequence of letting users decide who they wanted to be beside was huge buy-in," says Brock. "The users really felt like they had a stake in this project, which has helped us enormously in breaking down institutional silos."

Room for Improvement

Many of the unintended consequences produced happy accidents, but Brock also singles out a few instances where lessons were learned. For instance, deferred fit-out decisions delayed move-in. In general, the delay has allowed users who have trouble visualizing from blueprints to physically experience their new space in order to more clearly express what they want. At the same time, the multiple functions, especially on the basement floors, created the need to juggle often-conflicting requirements of, say, the pathogen-free animal facility vs. the gross anatomy lab.

"There were issues where we just couldn't fit all the things users wanted, so we had to keep making judicious choices for compromise," remarks Brock.

And even though the medical school met its opening target and researchers are reasonably well settled on the top floors, the building is still a construction zone, running without shipping/ receiving and other internal functions.

Original plans for building security entailed severely restricted access among the diverse research groups.

"We underestimated how much people would like working together in this one space," says Brock. Now UBC is retrofitting the building with a scheme of perimeter key cards so once occupants have access to the research zone they can go anywhere.

Perhaps the worst unintended consequence stemmed from being so focused on what had to be done at the moment that there was little time to reflect on what was coming next. "That is not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, it worked much better than I imagined," Brock concludes.

By Nicole Zaro Stahl