Latest Reports

Colleges and universities are rethinking their workplaces to align their space with how people work today and to use space to achieve their strategic goals. Beyond macro forces reshaping higher education in terms of access, accountability, and financial stability, there is a confluence of financial, environmental, technological, and cultural factors prompting this change, including increasing numbers of administrative staff and a growing disengagement among faculty and staff. But the most common mistake that institutions make when trying to change their workplace is assuming that they are trying to solve a space problem. Even if the impetus for a project is a space problem—you’re out of space and have no place to put the new faculty or staff member you just hired!—you won’t solve it by thinking about it that way. It’s more complex and nuanced than that. What you need first is a workplace strategy, a coherent statement that describes how your space will be used to help you achieve your larger strategic goals.

Clients look to architects to help them make decisions regarding the built environment that can greatly impact the future of their institutions and their employees. Doing that successfully depends on the quality of information used to make those critical decisions. Collecting comprehensive data from multiple sources, substantiating it with research, and analyzing it with proprietary software developed by HDR enables the firm to provide clients with the kinds of customized information necessary to make sound decisions and help predict building performance.

The new addition to the existing Pharmacy Building creates an exciting and energetic new identity for the School of Pharmacy on the Rutgers University Brunswick campus, as well as a new front door located on a main campus pathway.

Faced with inadequate facilities and insufficient space to accommodate increasing enrollment in its STEM programs, Mercer University in Georgia had to make a decision: Continue using classrooms built in a bygone era and miss valuable opportunities to attract top students and faculty, or construct a new facility that offers opportunities for consolidation, interaction, and collaboration. University leaders chose the latter with the establishment of the $44 million Spearman C. Godsey Science Center, which opened in January 2018.

As a new paradigm for healthcare leadership training in the Coastal Georgia region, the Health Professions Academic Building at Waters College of Health Professions will serve Georgia Southern University’s mission to drive economic and regional workforce development needs. The new building houses state-of-the art simulation facilities, nursing skills and assessment labs, a large multi-purpose space, conference room, classrooms, open collaboration spaces, student study rooms, shared lounge space, and active learning/teaching labs that serve many of the university’s programs, including cardiovascular interventional sciences, radiologic sciences, nuclear medicine, medical laboratory science, respiratory therapy, and communication sciences and disorders.