Space Use

Facility managers can achieve optimal performance by “sweating their assets”—making existing assets work harder—through a careful analysis of what factors contribute to the highest throughput and then undertaking initiatives that will help them reach those goals. Doing so may eliminate the need to create expensive new space but may require facility redesign, says Cyrus Yang, executive director of delivery system planning for Kaiser Permanente.

Aiming to exit two leased facilities, backfill an owned building, and reunite departmental groups, Wells Fargo Bank successfully completed a two-year restack, consisting of approximately 40 projects that moved about 5,000 employees and touched roughly 1.1 million sf in seven Charlotte, N.C., facilities. A time-based migration planning process allowed Lori Ferguson, Wells Fargo senior properties project manager, and her team to keep the gargantuan task on track as it implemented the corporate strategy.

The three-story, 183,000-sf “@4240” building—originally constructed in 1948 as a telephone handset factory—provides flexible tenant solutions, including customized labs for both large- and small-molecule research; dry labs for electronic, medical device, or software research; and modern office space.

With an overwhelming amount of space data—collected from and managed by RFID chips, space utilization models, visual schedule maps, BIM—the best outcomes increasingly rely on the ability to analyze, distill, and communicate that information, according to Jeff Funovits and Alex Wing, principals with Stantec. This is particularly true when it comes to the design and planning of medical, research, and educational environments, where efficiency and meaningful learning or clinical outcomes are the measures of success.

GlaxoSmithKline recently engaged Computerized Facility Integration (CFI) to develop an executive reporting dashboard that will give leaders the ability to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that help identify organizational opportunities and missteps. Once developed, this strategic information will help the real estate group quickly set a course to bring rapid improvement and reduced costs.

As health science education becomes increasingly interprofessional, the design of academic medical facilities is changing to reflect this new type of learning. Collaboration is the cornerstone of interprofessional medicine, as health care providers strive to offer the best patient care. Nurturing such collaboration begins in the educational facilities where students from multiple disciplines learn the importance of working together.

Though it sounds counter-intuitive, trying to customize flexibility in research spaces may actually inhibit the intended outcome in the long term, according to Niraj Dangoria, associate dean of facilities planning and management at Stanford School of Medicine, and David Bendet, associate principal at Perkins+Will Architects. Designers should focus instead on the people and modularity, even when future research needs are uncertain and can change rapidly.

High-performance core facilities, spurred by proliferating cross-disciplinary investigations and technological advances, can benefit from the long-standing focus on flexibility that has generated so many design efficiencies in the traditional research lab, says Randy Kray, senior vice president and science and technology director of programming and planning at HOK.

With no private offices or assigned seats, not even for top executives, employees at GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) corporate office at the Philadelphia Navy Yard work in a variety of work settings. Work spaces include the atrium, the cafeteria, sit-to-stand workstations, quiet rooms, meeting rooms, and even the rooftop.

Boston College has renovated 6,500 sf of undergraduate teaching laboratories in the Merkert Chemistry Building to create state-of-the-art learning environments that support strong interactive relationships between instructors, teaching assistants, and students. The project includes three teaching laboratories for general and analytical chemistry. The dual goals were:

Space doesn’t drive an organization’s culture, but when thoughtfully designed, it will enhance and support the work. Culture—the shared set of values, goals, and practices critical to decision making and business success—determines work styles, space, and effectiveness, making it one of the most important drivers of collaborative workplace design for an organization.

The Coordinated Approval Process for Clinical Research (CAPCR) is a web-based application that streamlines the approval process required to conduct research using human subjects. Designed to help researchers and hospital staff navigate the process of coordinating and tracking clinical research within a hospital system, CAPCR gives an institution time to plan for the infrastructure a line of research will necessitate, and to mitigate any associated safety hazards. CAPCR automates the approval process, avoids duplication, and creates an online repository for study-related information, allowing faster approval times and greater access to information. It also eliminates the need for paper application forms, helps researchers ensure they have the necessary approvals for their studies, and provides an efficient way to obtain authorizations from multiple departments and track approvals online. The system is being marketed as a tool for use in other hospitals.

Genentech will apply an innovative, data-driven space-optimization model when it opens its newest 250,000-sf office building in 2015. The facility’s headcount will exceed seating capacity, and space will be assigned to groups but not to individuals within the group.

The Molecular Engineering and Sciences Building (MolES) at the University of Washington demonstrates that flexible university science facilities can encourage collaboration and accommodate unknown occupants, but be mindful of the need for a variety of dedicated meeting spaces and private areas, and the potential need for a shift in the office/lab culture and the mindsets of the facility’s users.

New metrics for designing scientific research space measure the predictors of human interaction in a research environment. While traditional metrics measure productivity in quantitative terms, new metrics—based on interaction, sustainability, and performance—look at qualitative factors to determine what type of environments encourage collaborative research.