Space Use

Renovating an old science complex can be a cost-effective way to transform a 1970s relic into an education facility for the 21st century. The Gant Science Complex, built between 1970 and 1974 on the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut, is big—285,000 sf—but outdated and environmentally inefficient, with an R value in the single digits. It also reflects old-fashioned science teaching and research methods, making it hard to enable the kind of collaborative learning used today.

It started, not with a budget or a space, but with an idea. Today, that idea has become seven stories of collaborative lab space for cutting-edge genomic research, called the New York Genome Center (NYGC). It happened with the help of innovative solutions that allowed a team to repurpose ordinary office space in a select but heavily regulated neighborhood. The result is a large, flexible, and productive facility that brings together laboratories, conference areas, a data center, and clinical space to encourage innovation and discovery—all while achieving LEED Gold certification.

To work effectively with huge amounts of complex research data requires not just computational efficiencies, but team-centered facility design. The Allen Institute’s new 270,000-sf Seattle facility implements an innovative floor plan to integrate lab space, office space, meeting space, natural lighting, air flow—and most importantly, movement of people. “What we have done with our new research building is to take the basic research model and scale it up to a more team-oriented environment,” says Paul Wohnoutka, senior director of operations. And it supports this new environment with several inventive energy-saving mechanical systems.

The RAND Corporation transformed 10,000 sf of a Class A office building it leases in Alexandria, Va., from 100 percent closed, assigned offices and cubicles to nearly 100 percent unassigned seating, with glass walls throughout. The controversial pilot program has been an overwhelming success: An independent study found that the new design increases unplanned interactions among researchers and improved support for teamwork, while at the same time sustaining or improving the environment for deep concentration. It also increased space utilization by 30-35 percent. The original pilot space has been tripled, plans are in the works to convert more space this way, and RAND intends to implement this design for all new office space. Its success has been enabled by a wide range of IT solutions that RAND developed to support it.

These are trying times for public higher education. Scarce capital funding, changing student demographics, missed enrollment targets, hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance, combined with the academic shift to active learning—all these factors, and more, suggest the need to rethink the traditional residential campus. Bowling Green State University (BGSU) has taken a wide-ranging look at the physical form and mode of operation of its campus, with an eye on more productive asset utilization and greater design flexibility. Its phased, multi-year plan has entailed demolition, renovation and adaptive reuse, and new construction. The plan also reflects a new vision of shared spaces that allow the school to do more with less, implemented by minimizing or eliminating single-use spaces, designing versatile classrooms that accommodate a variety of programs, creating multipurpose buildings that welcome a wide portion of the student body, and expanding the scheduling window.

A leader in the field of plant sciences, Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, is recognized as a pipeline of new ideas and talent for the state’s massive agriculture industry. Yet despite explosive growth in biosciences enrollment at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, the most recent biosciences building was 30 years old and “bursting at the seams,” says Mark Rhoades, chief design officer and principal, The S/L/A/M Collaborative.

Health education institutions nationwide are pivoting toward instructional programs anchored around interprofessional team-based care models that satisfy accreditation requirements and better prepare tomorrow’s healthcare professionals by simulating real-world environments. In addition to improving outcomes, integrating multiple departments with shared resources can also increase space efficiency and lower operating costs.

The 92,000-sf, three-story GuideWell Innovation Center, located in the heart of the Lake Nona Medical City health and life sciences park in Orlando, Fla., is designed to be the epicenter for the development of new healthcare solutions. The building—which provides space for long-term lease, short-term projects, meetings, and social gatherings—can accommodate wet lab and office uses with an infrastructure that encourages the collaboration necessary to help companies move their ideas from brainstorming to commercialization.

A new approach to the design of diagnostic labs in resource-constrained settings reduces risk and improves outcomes while accelerating the project timeline and lowering costs. The approach is based on the concept of One Prototype, which uses similar design modules as a starting point for each lab facility, whether new construction or renovation, no matter what the scale.

The 21st century workplace offers multiple types of environments, and workers typically occupy an assortment of spaces throughout the day. How to get the right people in the right place at the right time to spark collaborations for creative problem-solving is more than just a question of corralling bodies. It’s a matter of creating the right kind of spaces and a path of least resistance toward utilization with the occupant experience as the prime focus.

The new scientific workplace (NSW) transcends departmental and organizational boundaries to create a high-performance open environment that fosters multidisciplinary collaboration, creativity, productivity, innovation, and product development. While the concepts of multidisciplinary teamwork and open buildings are not new, the NSW uses an overarching approach to ensure a facility is flexible enough for future development, and provides an environment that attracts top scientists.

Modern research and academic facilities are increasingly adopting design principles typically used by small, fast-growing startup companies that depend on flexibility, innovation, and collaboration to succeed. Open workplace settings, dedicated collaborative spaces, smaller work teams, onsite entertainment zones, and shared support hubs are all examples of design features that are being deployed by larger research institutions and other organizations to improve performance and leverage changing demographics for better outcomes.

The Novartis headquarters in Sydney, Australia, demonstrates how to create a multi-tenant space where employees at all levels can choose their work setting depending on their activities, as long as there is abundant space for collaboration and informal interaction across all sectors. To create appeal for Novartis employees and attract new tenants, the redesigned floor plan offers several options for activity-based workspace, and has multi-purpose furnishings, demountable walls for offices and meetings rooms, and cast-in-place conduits for data and power in the slab with floor boxes.

What the university needs: A spacious, modern science building, with an additional 5,000 sf. What the university has: An old, dark, rather cramped classroom building, built for a different era in education, with inadequate systems, and no room to expand. It’s a common problem on university campuses, and in many cases solving it requires flexibility, creativity, and patience. At the University of Pittsburgh, Howard Skoke, AIA, of EwingCole Architects and Engineers and the university’s own Ilona Beresford worked together on a six-month master plan to devise a $65 million modernization. The project, scheduled to begin construction in May 2019, will open the building to new uses and adapt its systems for health and efficiency. At the same time, it will preserve a historic exterior and cost far less than a new building.

The WELL Building Standard™ codifies several design and operational attributes that promote human health and wellness in the workplace. The outgrowth of a collaboration among architects, engineers, and the medical community to identify and address today’s top public health concerns, WELL takes conventional wellness initiatives several steps further by advancing a people-centric agenda that focuses holistically on employees’ physical, mental, and social well-being.