Latest Reports

As Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) experiences exponential growth of its online programs, it continues to invest in its physical campus, most notably in a new college of engineering. While the university is not looking to increase its on-campus enrollment, it is expanding its offerings on its Manchester, N.H., campus, with new facilities, an academic quad, two new residence halls, and a large greenspace. The centerpiece of this investment is the $45 million, 68,000-sf College of Engineering, Technology and Aeronautics (CETA), the first new academic building added to the Manchester campus in over a decade. The CETA building, which opened in January, is SNHU’s first new facility devoted to engineering technologies, and will help expand access to STEM education in the New England region.

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.

Construction of the $65 million Wanek School of Natural Sciences at High Point University (HPU) in North Carolina is part of a campus transformation that began in 2005. The 127,417-sf Wanek building, which opened in August 2019 to house the biology, chemistry, and physics departments, is helping HPU meet the demand for more space to accommodate an increasing number of students and faculty.

Corporate and academic research institutions are shifting towards a more interdisciplinary model for designing new lab buildings, with the goal of accelerating discovery times and increasing innovation. This means creating more open, team-based laboratories, with shared equipment and collaboration areas that increase interaction between scientists from different disciplines while optimizing space and resources. Two recent case studies illustrating this approach include the new 840,000-sf Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) in Cambridge, Mass., and a new 316,000-sf academic science facility at Towson University near Baltimore, Md. While one project is corporate and the other academic, much of the design and programming for both projects is focused around mapping out the research activities needed to get to the desired outcome.

1. Academic Workplace Evolution: How Universities Are Rethinking Spaces for Faculty and Staff
2. Using Data-Driven Design to Produce Research-Supported, Customized Client Solutions
3. Five Space Planning Principles to Avoid the Inefficiencies of Research Program Turnover
4. University of Michigan/Ford Robotics Building Designed for Research and Recruitment
5. Designing Academic Research Facilities for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
6. Combining Research, Medicine, and Athletics to Create New Translational Models
7. LAB2050: Imagining the Lab of the Half Century
8. First Engineering-Based Medical School Integrates Disciplines with an Eye to the Future
9. Adding Manufacturing to a Pharmaceutical Research Lab
10. Designing Diverse Learning Environments and Maker Spaces