Latest Reports

Many college graduates remember, with varying degrees of fondness, the spartan cinder-block dorms of their youth. Today, when most universities are competing for students, the pressure is on to add amenities like e-sports rooms, private bathrooms, and walk-in closets. How can an institution stay competitive while still keeping costs down? The secrets include thorough planning and canny management of contingency.

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh is working in partnership with San Francisco-based Emerald Cloud Lab on a new $40 million facility that will house more than 200 discrete life science and chemistry research instruments, but very few human researchers, teachers, or students. Instead, the instruments and artificial intelligence tools within the new CMU Cloud Lab can be accessed remotely via the cloud from anywhere in the world to conduct experiments at any time of the day or night. The new 16,000-sf Cloud Lab will be housed in a CMU-owned building in Pittsburgh’s Bakery Square, 10 minutes from the main campus. Construction is scheduled to conclude by May 2023 and to be fully operational by the fall 2023 semester.  

The University of Michigan has transformed the way science is conducted and communicated by integrating the Museum of Natural History into its uniquely designed $261 million Biological Sciences Building (BSB). The 312,000-sf building opened for classes in 2018, and the museum opened a year later, facilitating connections between university researchers and the community. More than 200,000 members of the public visited the museum within the first year, underscoring the university’s belief that science is a social, not merely transactional, interaction.

2022 offered a glimpse of what the post-pandemic era might look like, with a redefinition of “workplace” in a hybrid setting; examining the benefits and challenges of renovation vs. new construction; and using data to drive complex facilities decisions. The following are the reports that Tradeline readers found most helpful in 2022, as they focused on strategic space planning in this shifting environment:

Creating an efficient, productive, and safe rodent vivarium of any size begins by determining the current and future needs of both the researchers and the animal care staff. Collecting data from users throughout the process of new construction or renovation ensures the design aligns with their research, equipment requirements, utility specifications, and animal care needs.