Latest Reports

Because it’s expensive to heat and cool outdoor air drawn into a building, workspaces tend to be ventilated only enough to meet ASHRAE minimums or achieve a LEED credit. But air quality profoundly affects workers’ cognitive performance, and even modest increases in ventilation can yield productivity and health benefits that far exceed the cost, says Joseph Allen, assistant professor and director of the Healthy Buildings Program at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

It can be hard to know whether a building initiative is meeting the mark by looking at anecdotal feedback about what worked and what didn’t. Pre- and post-occupancy data make it possible to evaluate the success of a design strategy. Studies indicate that the new Center for the Sciences & Innovation (CSI) at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, is attracting more students from all departments to the building, boosting integration between science and non-science majors, and increasing interest in STEM studies among incoming students at a rate of 50 percent.

Designers of undergraduate engineering learning environments must draw from a broad range of solutions to meet the specific pedagogical needs of each institution, beyond the traditional “wet” or “dry” designation of basic science teaching labs. In addition to designing for appropriate equipment scale, strategies include pairing labs and teaching space, providing a variety of maker or innovation spaces, building fewer two-story high-bay areas, and using scaled options for airflow and ventilation.

The expansion of interdisciplinary research to include an engineering component is changing the space model for academic institutions. Science facilities had already broken new ground when they blended various branches of life and physical sciences together under one roof. Adding engineering to the mix has triggered fresh thinking about a host of design standards, ranging from lab-to-lab-support ratios to building organization to the configuration of office and collaboration spaces.

With the second-lowest population density of any state in the US and two cows for every human, Wyoming has long been a land of wide-open spaces, except for science students at the University of Wyoming. For decades, UW students have studied science in “dingy, dark, old basement labs,” says Daniel Dale, department head and professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Wyoming. But a new building has changed all of that—with active learning spaces, abundant natural light, and a new emphasis on collaboration—and increased student attendance and performance to boot.