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Just one year after Wellesley College trustees approved a long-term campus renewal plan, the college had three projects in construction and six in design. In all, some $137 million worth of work, roughly 25 percent of the total plan, is currently underway, thanks to Wellesley’s bold approach: At once sweeping and granular, the process departed from traditional master planning by employing multiple architecture firms and incorporating up front many activities typically not seen months or even years into the design workstream.

The new three-story Bertelsmeyer Hall, home of the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, contains wet and dry research labs, classrooms, 19 faculty offices, lecture halls, and highly specialized labs and high bay spaces. Sixty percent of the building’s net square footage is dedicated to research space, and 40 percent to teaching spaces and offices.

The four-story, 104,000-sf Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories building at Johns Hopkins University consolidates under one roof undergraduate labs and faculty from the departments of chemistry, biology, biophysics, and psychological and brain sciences, and the undergraduate neuroscience program. The facility connects to Mudd Hall and completes the fourth side of the Mudd/Levi/Biology complex, replacing aging lab space—much of it underground with poor circulation and sightlines and no natural light—spread throughout campus.

The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) has crafted a decision-making framework based on objective standards to identify and pursue the highest priorities in a massive building boom that has roughly 95 projects valued from $10,000 to $450 million currently under construction. While a large part of that activity stems from the university’s long-range master plan, a significant portion was necessitated by the devastation of Hurricane Ike, which took 1.2 million sf of the medical school’s Galveston campus out of service in 2008. 

The four-story, 80,000-sf Research and Graduate Education Complex on the campus of Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) is a state-of-the-art biomedical research facility for researchers from the colleges of Pharmacy, Medicine, and Graduate Studies. Three floors of laboratories and support spaces house more than 30 scientists and their teams, with space for 156 bench researchers. The building also contains office space for faculty, write-up areas for research staff and students, and small-group teaching and seminar rooms.