Latest Reports

The Bush Science Center at Rollins College is a state-of-the-art facility built to expand the high quality of the sciences on campus, while at the same time support the College’s mission of a liberal arts education. The LEED Gold-certified building includes teaching and research laboratories, laboratory support areas, classrooms, computer classrooms, faculty offices, conference rooms, and building support spaces.

Faced with aging buildings, decreased national funding, no buildable space on the urban campus, plus new research grants that required additional lab and bench space, and a medical school reorganization to consolidate eight basic science departments to four while adding two department chairs and eight principal investigators, Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM) introduced an initiative to reclaim and reallocate available research space without new construction.

George Mason University’s Exploratory Hall Science Building is the culmination of a five-story, 100,600-gsf renovation of the former Science + Technology II building, and a 64,000-gsf, four-story addition that connects to Planetary Hall. The renovated structure houses computational and dry laboratories; computer classrooms for GIS, computational science, and mathematics; lecture halls; and gathering spaces.

Today’s high-performance laboratories can be categorized into three different “platforms,” or core facilities, each with a unique set of metrics and key features that set them apart in terms of productivity, ability to support emerging programs, and economy of operation (both capital and energy). Understanding the distinguishing features can increase productivity and operator efficiency, and ensure the proper investments for future flexibility and adaptability.

Suffolk University’s new 110,000-sf, 10-story academic building, 20 Somerset Street, contains four floors of general classroom space topped by four floors of lab space—1,100 classroom seats in all—in addition to a first-floor, 200-seat cafeteria that doubles as a function room. In the middle is a floor dedicated to student support services, including computer labs and a learning center. The building houses the university’s physics, chemistry, and biology departments, as well as the journalism and communications department and faculty offices.