Latest Reports

The University of Chicago’s two-story, 2,450-sf Warren Woods Ecological Field Station is the first Passive House-certified laboratory in North America and only the fifth in the world. “Passive House” standards achieve minimal energy usage for heating and cooling, despite the presence of a minus-80-degree-Celsius freezer, plant growth chambers, an incubator, and tools for DNA extraction, all of which generate a lot of heat, coupled with a humid environment and a high level of occupancy by researchers.

The renovated OB-GYN academic offices at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) eliminate private offices in favor of shared desks and open concept space, to accommodate a planned 20 percent staff increase while decreasing total departmental square footage. The department, which previously housed about 80 people in 14,000 sf, can now accommodate 106 people in 13,000 sf. The gut-and-rebuild also improves ADA compliance for the 1950s building and provides more natural light and collaborative space.

The seven-story “3.1” research building on the University of Washington Medical School’s South Lake Union campus adds 160,000 nsf of research and research support space for more than 300 occupants to a seven-building master plan totaling 1.2 million gsf.

Facility managers can achieve optimal performance by “sweating their assets”—making existing assets work harder—through a careful analysis of what factors contribute to the highest throughput and then undertaking initiatives that will help them reach those goals. Doing so may eliminate the need to create expensive new space but may require facility redesign, says Cyrus Yang, executive director of delivery system planning for Kaiser Permanente.

The three-story International Vaccine Centre (InterVac) at the University of Saskatchewan is one of the largest vaccine research centers in the world and the largest in North America. It is connected by a walkway to the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) laboratory building in a cluster of life sciences R&D facilities at the University. The facilities operate together as VIDO-InterVac, one of only a few BSL-3 facilities in the world that can accommodate disease and vaccine research involving animals as large as cows.