Laboratory: Wet

After a 2017 fire sped up the timeline for construction of a new science building, University of Delaware faculty and staff needed to make hard choices about how the building should be organized and what features and facilities it should include. Politically, the easiest path would have been to divide the space by department, but Peter Krawchyk, the university’s vice president of facilities and university architect, had a different idea of how to make the decision, one he argued would work better: “We didn’t begin with any kind of programming—number of principal investigators, fume hood counts, or anything like that. We began with ideas and culture.” 

The decreasing amount of time researchers spend in their labs is changing research facility design and space allocation, with an increased need for lab support space, a more significant reliance on core facilities, the creation of additional write-up and data analysis environments, and the purposeful inclusion of collaboration spaces.

Eli Lilly and Company opened the $700 million Lilly Seaport Innovation Center (LSC) in Boston in August of 2024. Developed by Alexandria Real Estate Equities and National Development, the 346,000-rsf facility offers Class A research environments for biomedical discovery. The 12-story structure also houses the first Lilly Gateway Labs on the East Coast to enable biotech start-ups to collaborate with Lilly scientists.