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The four-story, 93,500- sf Harrell Medical Education Building at the University of Florida (UF) houses teaching and training facilities for the medical education and the physician assistant programs, bringing together a broad variety of program spaces to promote interaction between students and faculty. The design includes an academic tower acting as the iconic gateway feature of the Health Sciences Campus. The building culminates a 10-year commitment to create a new campus on the north side of the medical center.

As academic institutions seek to bolster their competitiveness with new STEM capabilities, a fundamental early project question is whether an existing building can be renovated or new construction is necessary. The answer can have as much to do with shifting program priorities or campus culture as it does with infrastructure or cost—and it may not be obvious at the outset.

As interdisciplinary team research and translational medicine become increasingly critical to advancing medical treatment of complex diseases, information itself—the visualization, shared storage, analysis, and harnessing of data—is becoming the most important driver in scientific research. The resulting shift to a higher ratio of dry (computational) space versus wet labs is forcing building designers to examine new ways to foster an open, collaborative culture while accommodating computational science needs.

The Sterling Chemistry Laboratory (SCL), located on Yale University’s Science Hill, is an iconic 157,800-gsf, three-story chemistry lab building designed by Delano & Aldrich and completed in 1923. The building structure of steel, reinforced concrete, and masonry, with a brick and brownstone exterior skin, remains intact, while the interior has been renovated to modernize the laboratory facilities and add 31,600 sf of space. The u-shaped building perimeter consists of a two-story head house at the south and three-story structures along the east and west. The primary focus of the SCL project is to provide cutting-edge teaching labs and associated support spaces within the footprint of the existing historic building, provide a much-needed roof replacement across the entire center area in the north and south, and provide a new HVAC system to support the science programs.

As part of a master planning initiative, the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia used survey tools to examine how faculty, staff, and students collaborate; how they use the campus; and how University facilities compare to other institutions. More challenging was finding a way to express qualitative data in a quantitative way, and share this data with campus leadership to inform planning and design decisions.