In the concluding Open Forum/Town Hall session of Tradeline’s Tradeline’s 2013 College and University Science Facilities Conference, moderator Derek Westfall, president of Tradeline, and subject matter commentators Kelly Cramm, senior associate at Henderson Engineers, Inc., and Samir Srouji, principal with Wilson Architects, led an interactive knowledge exchange on questions posed by conference attendees. This is an edited transcript of that exchange.
- What effect are the new undergraduate science pedagogies having on space plans for academic science buildings? What is changing with regard to pedagogies?
Srouji: We are seeing more undergraduates in the lab. More interestingly, we are seeing in this generation of undergraduates that their use of technology is very different. Spatially we are seeing innovation centers such as the one at Vanderbilt that we are working on right now. An innovation center is geared specifically for engaging undergraduates in entrepreneurial relationships with industry. That is being carved out as a technology-enabled space to be featured in the building and takes prominence.
Westfall: Students in the lab, technology, and industry engagement.
Srouji: Exactly.
- What are the big pitfalls to avoid in renovating old science buildings?
Cramm: One of the biggest issues we have with the older science buildings is the low floor-to-floor heights. They were, generally speaking, not air conditioned. So when you go to renovate one, you want to add air conditioning and modern fume hoods, and there is a lot of ductwork involved. One of the pitfalls to watch out for is being tempted to not put ceilings in to maximize the amount of space. In a laboratory that has fume hoods, that can cause a lot of problems with noise. So I would encourage you to figure out a way to use soffits or some other approach to get the ductwork in, so you can keep your ceiling, so you can mitigate the noise issues that come along with that.
- Who has done a recent renovation of an old facility, say 50 years old or older? What were the surprises that you found?
Cameron Wohlford, senior project manager, University of Alaska, Fairbanks: The floor-to-floor was probably the biggest surprise. The architects wanted to drive a 10-foot ceiling in a 12-foot floor-to-floor. You can’t let them do it. You have to compromise. Probably the biggest thing that we did was to do small additions to create shafts. Don’t be afraid to make your walls a little thicker to run ducts inside. You can go straight up and then collect them in a penthouse upstairs. In Alaska, we can do all of our mechanicals in penthouses. We create the shafts. Even though they might interrupt somebody’s space, and they may be unhappy with that, it is easier to go vertical with things and then collect them in a new penthouse, rather than trying to collect them horizontally in the ceiling space into a central point running up a 36-inch duct. Four 12-inch ducts fit easier turning up than one 36-inch duct.
Srouji: One of the key things is the triggers for ADA and code. At UMass-Lowell, with every study we did of their old buildings, we had to scope that out early, because that is a threshold that you might trigger. Knowing that in advance is a great asset.
Lee Tollefson, principal, RRTL Architects: We had a building that we planned to renovate. It was 9 foot, 4 inches floor-to-floor for chemistry. So we built an addition, moved chemistry, and then repositioned other departments or other people in that space to give us a situation where we didn’t have to deal with fume hoods and ductwork. Our acoustic ceiling, obviously, was only about 12 inches below the underside of the structure.
Westfall: Who is willing to move into that space? Other scientific disciplines?
Tollefson: We have a nursing program; we have a communications speech disorder and continuing ed., general science ed., low-tech science ed.
Adrian Walters, associate principal at ARC/Architectural Resources Cambridge: If the renovation is not the entire building, I strongly suggest not assuming that that the existing utilities will support the new renovation. An example of that would be emergency power, chilled water, supply air, any of those sorts of things that you might expect that if it supported the previous space, it should be able to support the new space.
Westfall: If you are reducing your air changes with some of these new, more highly efficient hoods and maybe demand-based control, things like that, are you able to get more modern science into the existing HVAC infrastructure?
Cramm: That is going to depend on when the building was built and what was there. We just did a renovation for a small private liberal arts college. In their general science building, there were only two fume hoods in the chemistry lab, while they wanted to go to six. So that meant pretty much all new infrastructure. It is also very important to check out what is there. Many times there is financial pressure to reuse infrastructure because you don’t see it. I highly recommend that very early on you check out the infrastructure for capacity and condition, particularly the ductwork. I had a project where they wanted to reuse the exhaust ductwork. When we got in there and started poking around, we found that the fume hood exhaust ductwork was full of holes. So we ended up stepping back, gutting all the ductwork, and not reusing any of it.
Richard Lynn, director of QA/QC-engineering at Texas A&M Health Science Center: In all this talk of retrofits, I have not heard anything about being able to accommodate, especially for a 50-year-old plus building, the higher load densities required for electrical, and the IT space required that may not be in the building, especially if you are going from a typical classroom building or administration building to a science facility. Have you had any problems with that?
Cramm: My experience is you always need a new electrical service, particularly if the building wasn’t air-conditioned. Also, modern laboratories are much more power-dense; 50 years ago, we didn’t have the kind of instrumentation that we have now. I always assume there is going to be a new service.
- What is the verdict on investments in flexibility features? Which ones are getting used and which ones aren’t? Who is not using flexibility features that were designed specifically for them?
Sharalee M. Field, senior planner for the sciences, Harvard University: Probably the most substantial thing in that area is the flexible casework. It has, over time, absolutely paid for itself. We first did that in a building that we opened in 2008, back when there was a premium for the flexible casework. Even just moving people into the building, they thought they knew what they wanted based on plans. The PI gets in there and realizes, ‘Oh, actually no, I want write-up over there and microscopes there, and this should be high bench.’ For our building staff to just to be able to go in and do that with basically no cost has been amazing. It has actually further gone on to empower the faculty to organize themselves. Groups of them have gotten together and said, ‘Well, okay, what if I moved down the hall and then you move in to my old lab from your building so we can all collaborate?’ They just come up with these ideas on their own and they know that we are able to say, ‘Sure, we can do that,’ because the systems are so flexible that it is not a financial burden. That has been fascinating to see evolve.
Wohlford: I am an engineer by training, but I became a biologist through our project. PCR work versus non-PCR work. (PCR is polymerase chain reaction.) When we developed tissue culture labs and the fume hood alcoves, we were under the understanding that everybody could share the fume hoods. If you are doing PCR work, you cannot share that same fume hood and alcove as people doing non-PCR work. We had to add one more fume hood back into the flexible labs. Luckily, we had a flexible lab. Watch out for that. If you do have something that is incompatible like PCR versus non-PCR work, make sure you provide a space for one of the two to be isolated.
- Who is using passive solar or natural ventilation for science buildings, or perhaps some other sustainability features, and what are the results?
Vikram Sami, associate partner, ZGF Architects: We have a lab in California, the Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, that is designed to be a net-zero-energy lab that has a huge PV array on it. It was designed to be net-zero so we didn’t approach it with payback analysis. The first cost of sustainability features, energy saving features, were actually evaluated against the cost of PV in that situation. That is a different way of looking at it.
Cramm: We are talking about PV, which is active solar, and you are right, we don’t get a large percentage. I have been on a project only once where natural ventilation was proposed for the laboratories. We pretty much voted that down as not a very good idea but did use natural ventilation in the office and classroom wing, separating those two so that we could set up our relative pressurization in the labs. I am interested in hearing whether anyone has actually done natural ventilation in labs and how in the world you would do that.
Srouji: I guess it depends on the type of science. If it is a wet lab or a fume-hood-driven lab that requires containment, then yes, it is tough to do natural ventilation. But if you’ve got a computational lab… For instance, when we look at a project, we do energy programming and look at equipment gains in that space, and then if we feel the load is low enough, and there is maybe four or five months of the year where it can be passively ventilated, we go ahead with that. But it is on a case-by-case basis.
- In academic research facilities, what do people mean by shared spaces, what spaces are actually being shared, and how?
Srouji: Soft spaces are easiest to share when it is designed for it. Shared equipment alcoves or rooms, and of course core facilities like a cleanroom, vivarium, by design are meant to be shared facilities. But definitely the soft spaces—collaboration, conference rooms—those are the easier ones to share across disciplines.
Westfall: Not laboratories, is what you are saying.
Srouji: In laboratories, you get into cross-contamination issues, and I think it is harder to share at the bench. We haven’t seen it as much.
Cramm: I have experience with shared laboratories. It was a private research institution, but because the nature of the research changed a lot, we had a lot of open labs that were shared. Some of the research was secure, and we had to have separate labs for that. In that situation, I think it is more easily controlled because you have management in charge who basically was able to say, ‘You are going to share this lab.’
Dave Matty, dean of the College of Sciences, Weber State University: We are in design development of hopefully our new facility. As we move forward, we are not doing anything other than what you have already heard from some of the people here: to have researchers share spaces to push the available square footage as much as possible. It depends on the discipline, obviously. But a lot of times, people need a certain amount of bench space and they can share the rest of the facilities. They can share equipment, an autoclave, an oven if they need to.
June Hanley, principal planner, HDR Architecture: The project that Julie Chen and I presented yesterday at UMass Lowell, all of the laboratories are shared, not only by faculty members at the university but also by industry. That was a big push to bring the community into the building. So that is one example, but no one faculty member owns the lab, and they don’t have faculty offices in the building. That was a top-down decision from the provost from the beginning, so that helped. The faculty member who has the most experience in whatever the focus or the function of that lab is hosts the laboratory, and they are known as hosts, not owners. We also are doing a building for the College of Staten Island for CUNY that is in design development, which is mostly dry lab and computer-based laboratories, and there it also was a top-down decision that there would be no computer-science-dedicated laboratories. There would be no laboratory dedicated to any particular department, that any of them would be loaded with software such that they could be used by any group.
Peter Gray-Mullen, capital project manager, University of Massachusetts, Amherst: We just completed a project with Samir Srouji on our life sciences laboratory, and it was a new model for us because we took multiple departments and brought those PIs into one building with shared laboratory space. For the last three months—I can’t say we have a lot of history—it worked out for the most part when it came to planning, designing, and moving everybody in, but there were a lot of operational/logistical issues that are still raising their ugly head. They are as simple as, debating whether it is a department function to change the paper or replace a toner or a gas. Now it has to be worked out at a much higher level.
Srouji: What made the sharing possible at Amherst is the fact that those PIs were actually forming groups around themes (clusters of research). So it was designed to be sort of a collaborative research group.
- What facility features can make or break interdisciplinary programs?
Mara Beth Bryan, research operations manager, University of California, Berkeley: White boards. As many white boards as possible with places for markers and preferably places to attach the markers so they don’t walk away. That way, people can sketch things whenever they are talking, wherever they are.
Westfall: We have heard some testimony that white boards in hallways don’t get used. Is that your experience?
Bryan: I have seen pretty much every white board get used. Along our office walls are white glass, so you can write on both sides of them. I see people do that quite frequently. We have white boards in the labs, in all of our interaction areas, so I have seen all of them get used. I don’t know that we have that many in hallways.
Michael Reagan, vice president of science and technology, Stantec: The key feature at McMaster University was a truly interdisciplinary space, but a single space that is capable of accommodating physics, biology, chemistry, etc. I agree with the blackboard comment. We need a place to share our thoughts so that everybody can see our thoughts. But also having the technical infrastructure: Having the fume hoods, the gas outlets, places to put aquaria. All the things that you really need in a truly interdisciplinary lab, those are the features we see.
Srouji: Having interaction happen vertically in a building is harder than horizontally. An atrium is usually an easy way to get a ‘home’ for all users in the building, and open stairs being the cheaper solution to achieve the same goal.
- The problem of a hood-intensive laboratory drowning out teaching and discussion? What is the solution for that?
Cramm: This is a really good question. It depends on the source of the noise. In the case of a fume hood, it could be any number of things: Is the sash closed? Be sure that the sashes are closed. Beyond that, it is a lot more difficult to mitigate once you have the problem, but there are a lot of good, simple engineering ways to mitigate noise before a problem arises: more bends in the ductwork, lagging the ductwork, using sound-deadening acoustical tile. When we put exhaust fans on a roof, even if it is a metal deck, we pour a concrete slab a certain dimension out from the fan; use a good vibration isolation curb. If you’ve done all of that, it is still possible to have a problem; then your best bet is to have an acoustical engineer determine the source and deal directly with that particular problem. Another thing you can do, which is more expensive, is transfer the exhaust from the hood to a general exhaust in the room, which generally speaking is going to be quieter. There are a lot of options but you do need to determine what the source of the noise is.
Westfall: Are ductless hoods noisier or quieter than standard hoods?
Cramm: I don’t have actual data. My suspicion is that ductless fume hoods are probably not nearly as noisy.
David DeGroote, dean, College of Science and Engineering, St. Cloud State University: When we were working on our I-SELF Building (Integrated Science and Engineering Laboratory Facility), we visited Weaver Three, Boston Scientific, and Maple Grove. What they did with their hoods is they lined them up and they put demountable walls all around them. They physically isolated them from the workspace, which was right next to it. If you needed to go in the hood, you just went into this really tight room, very small area. That whole building is all demountable walls. They just reconfigure it depending on what product they are working on. Again, that is a private industrial environment.
Westfall: Are there any safety problems with that? I mean, you can’t see somebody working at the hood if there is an accident.
DeGroote: It is all glass walls.
Cramm: Were there doors?
DeGroote: Yes.
Cramm: I’ve had that solution proposed and I don’t like it very much, because when you put all of your fume hoods in a small room, you have to get makeup air in there somehow, and we all know the rule for fume hood cross-draft is less than 30 percent of the face velocity of the hood. That is your maximum allowable cross-draft, so it is very difficult to get air in there, unless you’ve got open doors where the air can move in from the adjacent lab. That could be very difficult.
Srouji: Is a lower-flow hood a quieter hood by definition?
Cramm: Not necessarily. Many times, the source of the noise is either the fan noise transmitting through the duct or directly from the roof into the room, in which case a lower flow hood doesn’t mitigate that. Or it is the sound of the airflow control valves changing. Neither of those would be mitigated in that case.
Tollefson: I-SELF, where we put all the chemistry—72 fume hoods—in a roughly 40,000-sf building: We had three large fans on the roof, constant volume. One was standby and two were running. The noise was very troublesome. We changed the three fans to variable speed and made some adjustments so they are running at essentially two-thirds of the power, and that solved our problem. Our acoustic problems are more out on the site than in the building. But it is important to solve them there too.
Cramm: I’m glad you said that. You reminded me. I did that exact same thing on a project once. We analyzed it and, because the fans were at a more efficient point on their curve, it actually saved energy to run three fans at partial speed than it did two at full.
- How are intellectual property rights being maintained in a collaborative environment? How are white boards, cellphone cameras, all of these electronic devices that can record anything in the facility managed? Does anybody have experience with IP in some of these research facilities?
Bryan: We are in a fairly IP-rich field. Most people are working on the same IP, so that simplifies it quite a bit. But for a lot of things, if you don’t have context, you can’t really understand what is going on. If you put your sample into a mass spectrometer, yes, anybody can access the data. But without knowing what the sample is, or what you did to it beforehand, it doesn’t really matter. We do have an informed participation agreement that all the researchers who work on EBI funding have to sign, saying they are aware of the IP obligations. We have proprietary research going on in the BP area of our lab, and they do lock up some of their samples. But for the most part, it is not really an issue.
Westfall: And you have already said that you like white boards everywhere.
Bryan: Absolutely.
Westfall: Do you bring tour groups through?
Bryan: Yes we do, and we let people take pictures.
- If you had $1.8 million worth of renovation upgrade money, how would you get the most interdisciplinary teaching bang for the buck? That assumes a lot about your current facility, but let’s say that it was last renovated 15 years ago. What would you do with $1.8 million?
Srouji: I think visibility. Assuming that it is a building of more siloed space, opening it up and spending some money on the soft space, the collaborative space, in spots. For the rest of the money, maybe some HVAC system upgrades.
- How do you get the right lab furniture and not waste money on unneeded furniture, or fail to plan for furniture needs that you will have in the future?
Tollefson: We had about $2.6 million for lab casework and equipment, and about $900,000 for other office furniture. We didn’t spend all our money for the opening this August, but set some money aside. We are going to use the space for six months, maybe in the next semester, and then see what mobile casework is working, what they like. Then we will spend the rest of our money, maybe more smartly, so we are not buying pieces that are less useful or popular with the faculty and students.
Srouji: Is the system a flexible system already?
Tollefson: The majority of our labs are atriums with mobile casework. The perimeter is fixed cabinets.
