Space Use

The distinctive design characteristics of the tech workplace are spilling over into the scientific research environment. Elements like glass-walled open-plan offices and labs, activity-based spaces, and the embrace of WELL standards are all making an appearance in Merck & Co., Inc.’s new nine-story, multi-disciplinary discovery research facility, set to open in South San Francisco in 2019. Along with other yet-to-be determined innovations, these features likely will be incorporated in the $8 billion in U.S. capital projects the pharmaceutical giant announced it will invest in over the next five years.

Universities typically build or acquire new academic space sparingly, after long deliberation. When changing economic conditions dropped a whole campus into Lehigh University’s lap, the challenge has been to use that space in ways that support today’s education. Industrial giant Bethlehem Steel didn’t go formally bankrupt until 2001, but the writing was on the wall as early as 1987, when the company sold the majority of its “Mountaintop” research facility to Lehigh, which has since acquired two more buildings there, including Mountaintop C. That massive building’s three high bays attached to a curved bank of offices, is now home to student-driven projects in an environment that seeks to keep elements of the industrial feel and keep large bays as relatively rough, unfinished space.

While the term “strategic facility planning” is often used generically to refer to a variety of initiatives, it is actually a unique discipline with a distinct meaning, says Debora Hankinson, architect and director of Strategic Facility Planning at CRB Consulting. As an end product, a strategic facility plan (SFP) is the overarching document that sets the direction for all further planning activities, from master (or campus) planning to the tactical steps of capital projects planning, move management, and deferred maintenance planning.

The College of Engineering, one of 15 colleges and schools at Cornell University, has 21 percent of the undergraduate population, 32 percent of the graduate population, and 10 percent of the square footage of the campus. As part of the college master plan, Upson Hall, originally built in the 1950s, and one of the largest buildings on the engineering quad, was in line for modernization. The plan called for improving energy efficiency, providing student and faculty collaborative space, and creating wet, hybrid, nano-, bio-, and chemical engineering labs. Since the building is well-located and structurally sound, with good floor-to-floor heights for labs, the decision was to renovate the existing structure, rather than undertake new construction. The project, a complete gut and renovation of the 160,000-gsf building, scheduled in two approximately year-long phases, was completed in August 2017.

Purdue University’s new 178,000-sf Wilmeth Active Learning Center (WALC) contains seven different types of classrooms that are so integrated into the Library of Engineering and Science that “at times, you almost can’t tell the difference between them,” says Nanette Andersson, director of library facilities. The design was borne of years of study into the effectiveness of active learning and the kinds of spaces that best support it. The result is a facility that is utilized nearly 24 hours a day.

After nearly a decade of gathering data about what makes a STEM facility competitive and attractive to students and faculty, EYP Architecture & Engineering has distilled five features that are key to radically redesigning successful STEM facilities. Survey results obtained from more than 1,500 students and 330 faculty members at six universities reveal the characteristics in a facility’s design that help make the institution more competitive, enhance the effectiveness of science and engineering teaching, advance faculty and student research, increase the students’ interest in the STEM disciplines, and promote welcoming places to learn, study, and interact.

Anyone who has ever set foot in a hospital knows the scene: doctors, nurses, residents, and interns huddling in the hallway discussing a patient’s care. For any number of reasons, that is not the best way to confer, but traditional academic medical centers offer few alternatives. The situation is exacerbated by the increase in adjunct faculty who lack even scattered departmental resources like office space. At the same time, millennials are entering academic medicine with even higher expectations—of greater collaboration, pervasive technology, and continuous connectivity.

London Health Sciences Centre is utilizing Honeywell Vector Space Sense to optimize facility utilization and reduce operational costs. The software solution shows where, when, and how spaces are being used at any given point in time, enabling the operations team to make informed real estate and space allocation decisions. London Health Sciences Centre is a hospital network in Ontario with 15,000 employees occupying 1.9 million square feet.

Renovating an old science complex can be a cost-effective way to transform a 1970s relic into an education facility for the 21st century. The Gant Science Complex, built between 1970 and 1974 on the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut, is big—285,000 sf—but outdated and environmentally inefficient, with an R value in the single digits. It also reflects old-fashioned science teaching and research methods, making it hard to enable the kind of collaborative learning used today.

It started, not with a budget or a space, but with an idea. Today, that idea has become seven stories of collaborative lab space for cutting-edge genomic research, called the New York Genome Center (NYGC). It happened with the help of innovative solutions that allowed a team to repurpose ordinary office space in a select but heavily regulated neighborhood. The result is a large, flexible, and productive facility that brings together laboratories, conference areas, a data center, and clinical space to encourage innovation and discovery—all while achieving LEED Gold certification.

To work effectively with huge amounts of complex research data requires not just computational efficiencies, but team-centered facility design. The Allen Institute’s new 270,000-sf Seattle facility implements an innovative floor plan to integrate lab space, office space, meeting space, natural lighting, air flow—and most importantly, movement of people. “What we have done with our new research building is to take the basic research model and scale it up to a more team-oriented environment,” says Paul Wohnoutka, senior director of operations. And it supports this new environment with several inventive energy-saving mechanical systems.

The RAND Corporation transformed 10,000 sf of a Class A office building it leases in Alexandria, Va., from 100 percent closed, assigned offices and cubicles to nearly 100 percent unassigned seating, with glass walls throughout. The controversial pilot program has been an overwhelming success: An independent study found that the new design increases unplanned interactions among researchers and improved support for teamwork, while at the same time sustaining or improving the environment for deep concentration. It also increased space utilization by 30-35 percent. The original pilot space has been tripled, plans are in the works to convert more space this way, and RAND intends to implement this design for all new office space. Its success has been enabled by a wide range of IT solutions that RAND developed to support it.

These are trying times for public higher education. Scarce capital funding, changing student demographics, missed enrollment targets, hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance, combined with the academic shift to active learning—all these factors, and more, suggest the need to rethink the traditional residential campus. Bowling Green State University (BGSU) has taken a wide-ranging look at the physical form and mode of operation of its campus, with an eye on more productive asset utilization and greater design flexibility. Its phased, multi-year plan has entailed demolition, renovation and adaptive reuse, and new construction. The plan also reflects a new vision of shared spaces that allow the school to do more with less, implemented by minimizing or eliminating single-use spaces, designing versatile classrooms that accommodate a variety of programs, creating multipurpose buildings that welcome a wide portion of the student body, and expanding the scheduling window.

A leader in the field of plant sciences, Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, is recognized as a pipeline of new ideas and talent for the state’s massive agriculture industry. Yet despite explosive growth in biosciences enrollment at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, the most recent biosciences building was 30 years old and “bursting at the seams,” says Mark Rhoades, chief design officer and principal, The S/L/A/M Collaborative.

Health education institutions nationwide are pivoting toward instructional programs anchored around interprofessional team-based care models that satisfy accreditation requirements and better prepare tomorrow’s healthcare professionals by simulating real-world environments. In addition to improving outcomes, integrating multiple departments with shared resources can also increase space efficiency and lower operating costs.