Perkins&Will

Ohio University is constructing the $65 million Heritage Hall in Athens. Designed by Perkins+Will and DesignGroup, the three-story, 120,000-sf building will provide the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine (HCOM) with flexible environments for team-based learning to support the school's groundbreaking Pathways to Health and Wellness curriculum.

Washington University in St. Louis broke ground on a $616 million neuroscience research center in March of 2020. Designed by Cannon Design and Perkins+Will, the 609,000-sf building will accommodate over 100 research teams in collaborative neighborhoods to promote interaction. Strategically sited between the university's medical campus and the Cortex Innovation Community, the 11-story facility will house approximately 900 investigators from the departments of neurology, neuroscience, neurosurgery, psychiatry, and anesthesiology.

Maker spaces, active learning labs, and multidisciplinary collaboration spaces have become essential elements for educational engineering facilities nationwide, as academic institutions respond to the demands of modern industry. In addition to providing the robust infrastructure and fabrication tools engineering students need to develop practical skills, another important element of these space types is an emphasis on teamwork, entrepreneurship, and commercial viability. This means positioning maker and capstone project spaces in close proximity to meeting rooms, support spaces, and team collaboration zones. High-profile maker spaces also serve to help institutions increase industry partnership opportunities as well as student and faculty recruitment.

Most academic science buildings constructed in the mid-20th century were not designed to support the interdisciplinary, collaborative, and entrepreneurial dynamics of modern engineering teaching and research that occupy these buildings today. While motivations for renovation can range from the need to update outdated building systems, to the desire to improve the school’s ability to recruit new talent and donors, most major renewal projects share similar challenges of aging infrastructure, complex logistics, and phased implementation. Using examples from recent renovations at Cornell University, Ohio State University, and the University of Massachusetts, principals from Perkins+Will share how these and other challenges can be addressed.

Marshall University opened Stephen J. Kopp Hall in September of 2019 in Huntington, Va. Designed by Perkins+Will and Edward Tucker Architects, the 49,500-sf building offers instructional spaces, administrative offices, pharmacological labs, and research facilities for the School of Pharmacy. Stephen J. Kopp Hall is strategically sited in a new health sciences precinct to support the growth of interdisciplinary education programs.