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Renovating an existing science facility or constructing a new building at today’s busy colleges requires the right approach in order to minimize the impact on students and faculty, while also adhering to the institution’s financial goals and strategic plan. It is important to design the project in a manner that allows students to complete their courses, and for faculty to maintain their research and teaching schedules. This is achieved with one of three phasing strategies: using 100 percent temporary facilities, no temporary space, or a hybrid of both.

The U.S. economy grew at a healthy rate in the first quarter of 2017, adding roughly 176,000 jobs per month. Capital construction prices continued their 2016 trend, increasing at an average of 6 percent, depending on location. Construction job growth was approximately 89,000 or 1.3 percent nationally. Energy and commodity prices continue to remain at levels not seen since the 1990s, due to abundant international and domestic supplies combined with a strong U.S. dollar.

Today, doctors seldom work alone, and often work with technology, so the faculty at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas knew they wanted to make team-based learning a central part of their curriculum. They just needed a space to back up that plan. With a class of 240 students and an intense learning program, they realized their vision by creating a technology-rich space big enough to accommodate the entire class at once, and flexible enough to divide into smaller spaces when needed.

Intense pressure to attract the smartest students and prepare them for tomorrow’s workforce is prompting engineering schools to provide a broad education with hands-on learning, an interdisciplinary curriculum, collaborative activities, and partnerships with local industries. The broader curriculum goes beyond the traditional engineering principles and practices by providing maker spaces to stimulate students’ creativity, critical-thinking ability, and problem-solving skills.

The vision of “work anywhere, anytime” that accompanied the rise of the Internet is now firmly entrenched in reality, and static office seating is on its way to becoming a rarity. Employees can choose among conference or collaboration rooms, private “phone booths,” lounges, or coffee bars, all in the course of a single work day. A plethora of mobile apps easily handles functions like finding an available desk in real-time, booking a meeting room, specifying A/V set-up, controlling lights and HVAC, preparing visitor badges, even placing a catering order. Automated wayfinding can pinpoint a colleague’s whereabouts in the building and provide directions to the location. All these tasks don’t exist in isolation. The technology that makes them possible, like sophisticated motion sensors and cameras, is constantly feeding data into centralized space management systems that can do everything from scheduling restroom cleaning according to usage to calculating a building’s occupancy cost per employee.