Industry News

Thanks to the slowdown in the construction industry, the new Health Sciences Building at Palomar College is expected to come in under the anticipated $10 million price tag originally estimated for the two-story, 25,000-sf facility. Nursing and dental programs will be consolidated in the new building, which will house labs, both specialized classrooms and five general-use classrooms, and simulator rooms equipped with instructor-controlled mannequins. Completion of construction is expected in June 2010.

Construction has finished at Temple University’s new $160 million state-of-the-art School of Medicine building. Ballinger of Philadelphia designed the 11-story, 480,000-sf facility to provide 100,000 sf for medical education,  160,000 sf for patient care research, and 249,000 sf of dedicated educational laboratories and research space.  The emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration is exemplified by the Health Sciences Center library, cominbining the fields of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, and the related health professions.

The Harry R. Brooks Complex for Science, Mathematics and Technology at Wilson College, completed in January, hopes to qualify for LEED certification. The $25 million, 76,500-sf facility, a renovation and expansion of the existing Paul Swain Havens Science Center, was managed by R.S. Mowery & Sons Inc., a general contractor in Mechanicsburg, Pa. Research Facilities Design (RFD) served as the laboratory building design consultant. A two-story atrium provides ample natural light to the building.

The Department of Energy (DOE) and the FutureGen Alliance have agreed to develop plans for a commercial carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) facility in Mattoon, Ill. The flagship facility would be the first in the country designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Helen Diller Family Cancer Research Building at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), opened at the university’s biomedical research and education Mission Bay campus. The 163,865-gsf, five-story building was designed by Rafael Vinoly and is exclusively dedicated to cancer research, treatment, and prevention. Translational research into cancer’s basic biological mechanisms, brain tumors, urologic oncology, pediatric oncology, cancer population sciences, and computational biology will all be housed at the new facility.