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The five-story, 70,000-sf Duke Environment Hall, home of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, serves as a living laboratory of sustainable design. The building, which is tracking LEED Platinum, houses the rapidly expanding undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in the Environmental Sciences and Policy program.

Renovating or repurposing older buildings on college and university campuses is a cost-effective, sustainable, and efficient way to modernize or add program space, with the advantages of less time to completion and occupancy, fewer site planning challenges, and preservation of historic campus buildings. This approach also maximizes financial accountability and return on investment in a time of tight budgets and reduced federal funding, which requires academic institutions to depend more heavily on state support and creative funding streams, such as public/private partnerships.

Though it sounds counter-intuitive, trying to customize flexibility in research spaces may actually inhibit the intended outcome in the long term, according to Niraj Dangoria, associate dean of facilities planning and management at Stanford School of Medicine, and David Bendet, associate principal at Perkins+Will Architects. Designers should focus instead on the people and modularity, even when future research needs are uncertain and can change rapidly.

The Belfer Research Building provides Weill Cornell Medical College with a state-of-the-art laboratory facility in close proximity to the institution’s existing clinical, research, and academic buildings. With 13 floors of laboratories, three floors of research support space, and two floors of academic programs, the facility is scaled to accommodate Weill Cornell’s basic, translational, and clinical research needs.

High-performance core facilities, spurred by proliferating cross-disciplinary investigations and technological advances, can benefit from the long-standing focus on flexibility that has generated so many design efficiencies in the traditional research lab, says Randy Kray, senior vice president and science and technology director of programming and planning at HOK.