Carilion Clinic broke ground in late October of 2024 on the Taubman Cancer Center in Roanoke, Va. Designed by HDR, the $100 million facility will embody a fundamental shift in the delivery of oncology services. The six-story, 257,000-sf building will accommodate the needs of an increasing number of patients, who will benefit from direct access to precision medicine, sophisticated clinical trials, and leading-edge instrumentation.
A $139 million project to expand the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia (UVA) will provide cutting-edge business education well into the future by offering students the best technological resources, on-site and remote learning environments, and a variety of spaces to collaborate and socialize. The construction of a new 80,000-sf structure and renovation of a historic building, both slated for completion in March 2025, will grow McIntire beyond the 156,000 sf of space it has called home since 2008. The hub of buildings addresses a space deficit and creates a growing commerce complex, providing a link between the university, its students, and nearby business districts.
Virginia Commonwealth University needed new space for math and science classes. When prototypes and stakeholder feedback indicated the student experience was top priority, they changed their planned two-stage facility to a single STEM building focused on making it easier for students to learn in the ways that suit them best, with spaces designed to break down barriers between faculty and students.
The General Services Administration (GSA) completed construction on Building 53 at the Denver Federal Center in September of 2024. Designed by Gensler, the complex project involved the transformation of almost 200,000 sf in a 1940s-era structure into a modern and collaborative office environment. The sustainable facility collocates five federal agencies:
Lehigh University's new Health, Science & Technology Building is designed to break down silos between academic departments, to enhance faculty research and better prepare students for tomorrow’s transdisciplinary world. Three different lab modules—with no walls between them—facilitate easy transitions from one use to another, as well as expansion and contraction as needs change. And collaboration spaces are strategically located between labs throughout the building.
Prior to the development of a master plan for expansion of research facilities at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), campus facility planners conducted a 15-month strategic visioning initiative that resulted in the creation of a digital space planning and visualization tool called PREVIEW.
Ground was broken in October of 2024 on WORKBENCH, a sustainable office building in Austin, Texas. Designed by Dick Clark + Associates (DC+A) and built by Swinerton, the 50,000-sf facility will serve as a showcase for the utilization of mass timber and cross-laminated timber in the built environment. It is estimated that the mixed-use development will store approximately 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
When Wayne State University in Detroit released its campus plan—the Wayne Framework—in 2018, no one could have guessed how prophetic the school’s new approach would turn out to be. Rather than creating a campus plan that sets a specific schedule of chronological tasks and building projects, the Wayne Framework instead focuses on how the school should evaluate priorities on an ongoing basis, allowing the facilities department to remain flexible enough to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Within a few years of launching the Framework, those circumstances would include a global pandemic, catastrophic flooding, and numerous university leadership changes.
The idea of a workplace means something very different today than it did five years ago. Even before the pandemic, offices were not at full capacity. While occupancy rates have rebounded from their low point in 2020, commercial building spaces are now being used only about 30% of the time. That reality creates an opportunity to rethink what the remaining office space looks like. Employees want a reason to leave the comfort of their homes and endure the commute to the office. They are looking for purposeful presence.
Teaching-only lab buildings are so much more than simplified versions of the latest shiny new research building on campus. They serve as a hub for students, a point of pride on tours for prospective students, and an opportunity to showcase a college or university’s identity. But they do require special design considerations, especially around safety.
JLL’s Global Future of Work survey has explored the evolving world of corporate real estate since 2011. This year, it analyzes the key priorities, challenges, and strategies of more than 2,300 professionals and decision-makers from around the wold. Recent insights show that companies are adopting a cautiously positive outlook in this increasingly dynamic and ambiguous environment. With plans to increase and rebalance organizational headcount in the coming years, many are ready to invest in their real estate as they expect to increase their budget and footprint.
The Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies at the University of Texas Health in San Antonio illustrates the pivotal role location plays in enhancing the success of an internationally recognized research program. The Institute previously occupied two buildings at a research park 23 miles from the university’s main campus. University administrators wanted to collocate all research on the same campus to promote multidisciplinary collaboration and interaction, with proximity to all clinical research activities, and to promote efficiency and the shared use of resources.
After a 2017 fire sped up the timeline for construction of a new science building, University of Delaware faculty and staff needed to make hard choices about how the building should be organized and what features and facilities it should include. Politically, the easiest path would have been to divide the space by department, but Peter Krawchyk, the university’s vice president of facilities and university architect, had a different idea of how to make the decision, one he argued would work better: “We didn’t begin with any kind of programming—number of principal investigators, fume hood counts, or anything like that. We began with ideas and culture.”
The decreasing amount of time researchers spend in their labs is changing research facility design and space allocation, with an increased need for lab support space, a more significant reliance on core facilities, the creation of additional write-up and data analysis environments, and the purposeful inclusion of collaboration spaces.
The new Library and Learning Center at the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) has transformed the school’s former library from a quiet place filled primarily with stacks of books into a welcoming and dynamic environment focused on providing students access to the resources needed to succeed academically. In addition to the library, the renovated facility includes the learning lab, which brings together tutoring support previously housed in three different locations, a student academic computing center, nine group study rooms, two academic classrooms, and a One-Button studio for video production. The number of computers available for student use throughout the entire facility has increased from 30 to 300, an important advantage for the many CCP students who do not own personal computers.
