Tradeline's industry reports are a must-read resource for those involved in facilities planning and management. Reports include management case studies, current and in-depth project profiles, and editorials on the latest facilities management issues.
Latest Reports
New Technologies Enable Repurposing Academic Buildings into Labs
New analytical planning tools and HVAC technologies can dramatically ease the transformation of existing academic buildings into high-performance state-of-the-art science labs. Along with advances in quantitative methods to assess the potential of existing space, innovations in HVAC strategy offer compact and energy-efficient solutions that are well suited to campus structures erected for different purposes decades ago.
Edmonton Clinic Health Academy
The six-story, 578,000-sf Edmonton Clinic Health Academy (ECHA) at the University of Alberta, Canada, brings together 800 faculty and staff from 12 departments, and 6,000 students from the Health Sciences Department, who focus on population health, computational research, and translational research.
Project Demand and Market Stability Expected to Escalate Capital Construction Costs
Continued signs of stable economic growth indicate that the recovery is gaining momentum in many parts of the United States and Canada. Construction selling prices for institutional projects grew at a 6 percent annualized rate in 2012, on top of a 3 percent increase in 2011. Construction costs are expected to continue stabilizing and rising in many regions as market confidence and capital spending increase.
Survey Points to Continued Slow Growth in Academic Research Space
Research space at academic institutions increased 3.5 percent from fiscal year 2009 to 2011, one of the lowest two-year growth rates since a peak in 2001-03, according to the National Science Foundation's (NSF) most recent Survey of Science and Engineering Research Facilities. In that time period—the most recent data the NSF has—institutions planned fewer projects, and fewer projects came to fruition, an indicator that this "slow growth" trend will continue. The main growth area continued to be the biological and biomedical sciences.
Georgia Tech Integrates High Bay and Mid Bay with Labs and Offices
The Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions (C-NES) Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology integrates three distinct types of space to create a research environment that offers optimal flexibility. The 42,000-sf building is designed to facilitate research programs of today and tomorrow by featuring not only labs and offices, but also high-bay spaces capable of housing large or heavy pieces of equipment and mid-bay spaces where the equipment is usually less than 10 feet tall.