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The growing complexity of research has heightened vivarium design requirements, making it imperative that facility operators and users work closely with the architect and engineers in the early planning stages of construction and renovation projects. Resolving these 10 recurring issues up front can help avoid problems down the road.

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.

The use of software to aid in master planning is nothing new. At Payette, however, designers and engineers have collaborated to create new software tools to solve master planning issues as they emerge. “We have a range of really complex problems,” explains Jeffrey DeGregorio, a principal at Payette. “Because they’re part of these large-scale master plans, we need to represent them very clearly to be able to tell a story. I think Payette occupies this complicated little niche—complex organizations, complicated campuses.”

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.

An “onion skin” layout of lab adjacencies and biocontainment strategies derived from a thorough risk assessment process are highlights of the new construction for the South Dakota Animal Disease Research and Diagnostic Laboratory (ADRDL) in Brookings, S.D. The new 84,000-gsf (41,000-nsf) building, an addition to the original facility, will provide space to accommodate the burgeoning demand for molecular diagnostics while bringing activities on both sides of the ADRDL mission—research and diagnostics—under one roof.