Latest Reports

The Integrated Sciences Complex (ISC) at UMass Boston serves as a gateway to the campus and as an interdisciplinary hub for learning and collaboration, providing the university with state-of-the-art research, teaching, and training laboratories. It is the first new academic building on the campus since it opened in 1974.

A new 650,000-sf, $295 million complex in Portland, Oregon, consists of the 12-story Skourtes Tower and five-story Collaborative Life Sciences Building (CLSB), which are connected by an atrium nicknamed the “mixing bowl” because it brings everyone together in a central location. The complex supports an interprofessional, multi-institutional program for medicine, nursing, allied health, dentistry, and undergraduate sciences, as well as pure research.

London’s King’s College has tapped building information systems and financial data to maximize the use of space while reducing energy costs and carbon emissions by employing three strategies: leveraging shareable and flexible space, challenging assumptions about the need for individual offices, and having leaders set progressive examples for other staff. Efficiently planned and utilized spaces are inextricably linked with sustainability for growing academic institutions like King’s College, especially when the cost of property is expensive, according to architect and planner Ian Caldwell.

The University of Toronto, Mississauga, re-imagined its first-year biology teaching labs to update the space and encourage a more experiential learning environment that will hook students on biology and engage the entire building in what goes on there. They also need to accommodate classes of as many as 48 students, which their former space could not.

Increasing class sizes, curricular changes, and medical education mandates continue to influence the design of health science and medical education spaces, which means they must address the need for shared areas, systems-based learning and flexibility/adaptability, according to Scott Kelsey, managing principal, and Jonathan Kanda, principal, with CO Architects.