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 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. 

Though it sounds counter-intuitive, trying to customize flexibility in research spaces may actually inhibit the intended outcome in the long term, according to Niraj Dangoria, associate dean of facilities planning and management at Stanford School of Medicine, and David Bendet, associate principal at Perkins+Will Architects. Designers should focus instead on the people and modularity, even when future research needs are uncertain and can change rapidly.