Space Use

Designers of undergraduate engineering learning environments must draw from a broad range of solutions to meet the specific pedagogical needs of each institution, beyond the traditional “wet” or “dry” designation of basic science teaching labs. In addition to designing for appropriate equipment scale, strategies include pairing labs and teaching space, providing a variety of maker or innovation spaces, building fewer two-story high-bay areas, and using scaled options for airflow and ventilation.

The expansion of interdisciplinary research to include an engineering component is changing the space model for academic institutions. Science facilities had already broken new ground when they blended various branches of life and physical sciences together under one roof. Adding engineering to the mix has triggered fresh thinking about a host of design standards, ranging from lab-to-lab-support ratios to building organization to the configuration of office and collaboration spaces.

The North American headquarters for EF Education First, located in the former industrial North Point area of Cambridge, serves as a modern case study of an open office workspace. Designed to house more than 1,000 employees in a completely open environment, the 300,000-sf, 10-floor office building features pod-style team zones separated by a variety of lounges, meeting rooms, private Skype™ rooms, and large community spaces, including a café, activity rooms, and an onsite restaurant bar for socializing after work.

When the administrators at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) realized their space needs were growing faster than their existing buildings could accommodate, they did something unconventional: They approached the problem as a research project. Beginning in 2012, they analyzed their clinical research space needs, reviewed their available real estate, and visited other research facilities to observe best practices.

With a portfolio of 23 research buildings ranging from 30,000 gsf to almost 800,000 gsf, the research portfolio of the University of Texas MD Anderson Center in Houston covers nearly 4.5 million gsf. Despite bringing 11 of those buildings online in the past 15 years—nearly one building per year—the researchers at MD Anderson were left wondering why, even with all those facilities, there did not seem to be enough space. This was partially due to unprecedented growth, now with close to 22,000 employees, but that didn’t fully account for the problem.

Retrofit or renovate? It’s a common question facing many owners of laboratory facilities built in the 1970s, and the answer isn’t always obvious. A simple retrofit of building systems can improve reliability and cut energy consumption significantly, but a gut renovation can be transformative by enhancing performance and providing associated benefits in recruitment and retention, quality of life, and scientific productivity––benefits that can more than offset the higher initial cost.

Leading-edge interdisciplinary facilities like the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health (IFNH) at Rutgers University, as well as facilities in Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., are transforming academic research culture through the use of open building designs that foster cross-discipline collaborations and “emergent outcomes.” This approach to culture-driven facility design is also being successfully deployed at other universities across the country in an effort to improve the way research institutes operate and compete for grants and contracts.  

Tufts Institute for Innovation (TII), a health sciences research institute, strives to revolutionize scientific inquiry with a new model for research that will reimagine laboratory practice and accelerate human health breakthroughs. Inside the labs, researchers share space and equipment in an open, collaborative, team-like environment that exemplifies the TII mission, while also generating cost efficiency.

Space allocation can be a political minefield, but Stony Brook University School of Medicine (SBM) is changing that paradigm. Old-style backroom negotiations are being replaced with a wholly transparent decision-making approach that utilizes information technology to democratize space allocation and provide department chairs with an unprecedented wealth of information about their space and staffing, past, present, and future.

The University of Saskatchewan has renovated and modernized its health sciences education and research facilities to accommodate shared operations, space, and technology, using change management strategies to help faculty, staff, and students move from silos to a team-based model. The transformation incorporates institutional, as well as physical, changes, including restructuring established administrative processes and hierarchies.

After successfully launching FLEXplace—a dynamic initiative to increase employee well-being and business productivity—Johnson & Johnson further refined its activity-based planning approach and rebranded it as the “Workplace Innovation Program.” The revised program further establishes design and operating guidelines for creating collaborative and personal work environments for a wide variety of business functions in different locations and cultures around the world.

Even with large expanses of cubicles, the workplace environment at Intel’s new RA4, a seven-story office/factory building in Hillsboro, Ore., sports a fresh, contemporary look carefully calibrated to support the recruitment and retention of top employee talent. A combination of collaboration spaces and amenities, such as a 36,000-sf cafeteria that offers half a dozen different types of cuisine, along with an abundance of natural light and outdoor views, has produced a building that earns approval across the four employee generations that occupy the facility.

The Pirbright Institute’s Plowright Building represents a visionary new model for biocontainment lab design that includes offices, conference areas, an atrium, and a cafeteria all within the containment zone, so researchers don’t need to shower in and out multiple times a day. This inverts the traditional approach to biocontainment design by putting people at the center and lab spaces at the perimeter. Researchers enter the building starting in a centralized non-containment zone and work their way toward the perimeter throughout the day, in a one-way flow.

The new Vicki Sara Building on the urban campus of the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, includes a massive “Super Lab”—a single open floor plate of more than 8,600 sf that serves 220 students in any configuration up to a maximum of 12 separate classes simultaneously. From 2,500 to 3,000 students, over several sessions a day, pass through the lab each week. Powered by IT integration, the Sydney facility serves students studying chemistry, biology, cell biology/biochemistry, physics, physiology, and pharmacy compounding.

Other building features include:

Whether personal or professional, change evokes an emotional response. Workplace change initiatives, especially those relating to space, nudge (or jolt) employees out of their comfort zones and typically entail some modification in routine and behavior. Relationships change, as well, and questions arise about how to continue performing at a high level in the new environment. The fastest, most productive change strategies take these human dimensions into account.